The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping.
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks that felt like line noise to me.
It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship.
Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).