Unloading the World's Biggest Container Ship
A complicated dance of humans, robots, and gigantic ships.
London Gateway is a new port built to serve Britain's capital city. By dredging a deep channel along forty miles of the Thames, operators have created a harbor able to take on the biggest container ships in the world, involving a massive container-handling operation with the latest (and biggest) in robot crane technology.
The first custom-built container ship, the Hawaiian Citizen, set sail in 1957, with a cargo of 356 new 'intermodal' containers. Container ships were carrying 5,000 containers apiece by the 1980s. These days a port like London Gateway is a land of metal giants. And robots.
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