Maritime Transportation And Shipping Talk

Maritime Transportation has always been a dominant factor in Global Trading. Looking back through History we can see maritime transportation by the Egyptians as early as around 3200 BC. It is said that they had Maritime Trade Routs going as far as Sumatra (Indonesia). All maritime transportation depended on the wind until the mid 19th century when mechanized ships started with the arrival of the first Steam Engine. It is a belief that the first steam engine was built back in 1690 by the French inventor Denis Papin. The first known steam engine in a boat was in 1704 by the same inventor. The arrival of the steam engine in ships made for a gradual replacement of the sail ships. All of a sudden man was not depending on the flow of the wind anymore. It was the beginning of better and more efficient maritime transportation. New Trade Routes was opened up and ships were now able to carry things that in the past would not have been possible since the sailing time had been so long. Since steam engine came, ship speed was increasing and could be maintained for the duration of the trip. In the past with sail ships, the speed was just as fast as the wind could bring you. Larger and better ships were built, more power and better steam plants was built. It was a time with an explosion of development within maritime engineering and eventually led to the diesel engine that we have today. Diesel engines became a fact in the 20th century and again we saw an explosion within maritime engineering and maritime transportation saw some significant improvements.
Maritime Transportation is now at a stage were about 90-95 % of international trade is carried onboard ships of some sort. The largest part of this is probably Container Transport. These boxes of various sizes, mostly 20’ and 40’ size have revolutionized maritime transportation. The largest problem facing maritime transportation today is being able to accommodate the flow of cargo in the shore facilities. Container Transport is demanding a lot of space for port operations and since the size of these ships are steadily increasing the need for deeper ports is also rising. Maritime transportation in bulk is also seeing a increase as more raw material is in demand. Newly developed raw material sites has seen new terminals being opened up and a demand for new tonnage in Bulk Carriers to be developed for this trade. In North Eastern Canada the simple geographical placement of the terminal demands ships that are able to handle heavy ice conditions during winter months. Maritime transportation can be the make or brake factor for some of these industries that are depending on it to get their product out to the International market. The extreme demand on vessel construction and power in order to handle this trade has made for many new innovations in naval architecture and marine engineering. As we are seeing more segmented marine transportation the arrival of tankers has also played an important role. The demand for fossil fuels as energy has made it into a very lucrative market for ship owners to invest into large tankers. A sub category to this kind of maritime transportation was the arrival of parcel tankers carrying specialty chemicals and other liquid cargoes.
In this article we have laid the base for understanding the history of maritime transportation and touched base with some of the segments within it. As we continue this series of articles we will go more in dept on the various segments and look closer at their individual history.

Technorati Tags: Maritime Transportation, Marine, Shipping