The interviews and various published sources pointed to the Matson Navigation Company, a shipping firm based in San Francisco since 1882, as a key player in the development of containerization on the West Coast. Matson’s engineers were among the first to focus on designing and testing containers, cranes, and other specialized equipment. The company also recruited operations and systems specialists from the oil and automobile industries to conceptualize containerization as a multi-modal network, not simply as ocean transport.