>> NARRATOR: Lifting, packing, and getting it out, the most you can move while staying in one spot, the first and last steps in transporting the materials that support our civilization. Now "Loading Docks" on<i> Modern</i> <i> Marvels.</i> <font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> >> NARRATOR: Every day, ships, trains, trucks and planes deliver the goods. An intricate web of transportation covers the earth. Along its strands, a never-ending cycle of loading and unloading keeps store shelves full and factories moving. And at every stop, there is a loading dock. Most of us may not give much thought to the loading dock, but those in the transportation industry realize it is the very heart of their business. >> MICHAEL KETCHAM: When I walk the distribution center, and I want to get what I call the heartbeat of the center, I go straight to the loading dock. You can tell just how everything is functioning by what is taking place on that dock. >> NARRATOR: The loading dock is a point of contact, the interface where transportation and storage hook up. Today, workers zip from truck to warehouse and back again on motorized pallet lifters. The pace is frantic. It has to be. The 1,200 workers in this warehouse in Brea, California are responsible for stocking over 300 supermarkets in Southern California and Nevada. >> KETCHAM: The general consumer doesn't understand when they walk into one of our stores just where all of those products come from. When you look at the amount of product that we ship in the course of a year, it's staggering when you think that we ship over 1.6 billion pounds of product. >> NARRATOR: The docks are humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It all begins as truck drivers back the rear of their trailers up to one of the 200 dock doors. >> HOWARD STANLEY: That truck has just arrived and is being unloaded. The product on it is all similar, just like these 2,000 cases of soda. It will be taken from here and moved into the warehouse to be shipped out later. >> NARRATOR: With this kind of volume, each incoming pallet of goods has to have a bar code sticker. Dock managers, using special handheld scanners, check in each pallet. Pallet drivers then whisk the goods deep into the warehouse to forklift drivers who place the pallets onto racks over 40 feet high. But that's just half the job. The thousands of goods that enter also have to leave... and quickly. Items that can spoil, like deli meat and dairy products, have to move fastest of all. In the past, the most time-consuming chore for workers was the separation of products. Managers at the warehouse rely on what they call the "mechanized system," a massive array of conveyor belts and electronic scanners, to quickly sort the goods. Workers known as "pickers" pull the requested products and place them onto feeder conveyor belts. The job is no picnic. Because the food must remain fresh, the entire 327,000 foot warehouse is kept between 28 and 34 degrees depending on the products' required temperature. >> JOHN DAVIS: Behind me, the sortation belt travels at 500 feet per minute, which allows us to sort 200 cases per minute, or 12,000 cases per hour. >> NARRATOR: At the end of the sorting process, the boxes speed down a ramp and under an electronic sensor. >> DAVIS: After a case is scanned, it's tracked as it goes along the sorter. When it gets to their appropriate lane, four chutes fire and push that product down that lane. >> KETCHAM: The mechanized systems in Brea provide us with efficiency and accuracy in the selection of our product for our stores. But even with the mechanized portion of this system, it all begins and ends with the human touch. Our selectors begin the process by loading product into the Mech System... and our palletizers take the product off the system and prepare the pallets for our retail stores. >> NARRATOR: But supermarkets aren't the only ones who depend on speedy loading docks. The need to move goods quickly permeates the entire manufacturing process right from the beginning. In some cases, products can find themselves on the back of a truck almost as soon as they're made. >> GARY LEE: Fresh beer for Anheuser-Busch is a distinct advantage in the marketplace. We have found that consumers prefer fresh beer. It tastes better, and it's much more drinkable. As a result, it's important for us, as we package the product, to actually get it to our shipping dock and get it to our wholesalers in as expedient a manner as possible. We generally are able to accomplish that in about one hour from the time it's actually filled until it's shipped. >> NARRATOR: Fast beer and plenty of it. At Anheuser-Busch's Van Nuys, California brewery, dockworkers load between 600,000 and 700,000 cases of beer a day. >> DICK RECK: The loading dock environment is an area that has a lot of moving equipment going from a fixed building into a movable object, a truck. And safety is a big concern with that because you need to make sure that the truck does not move while the loading is happening. The vehicle restraint and the controls for that allow that communication in securing the truck to the loading dock. >> NARRATOR: When a truck driver backs into the dock, a metal hook attaches to the vehicle to stop the truck from moving while it's loaded. Workers extend hydraulic dock levelers into the back of the truck to close the gap between the vehicle and the dock. The leveler ensures a stable surface for the forklifts to drive over. Some even come with added safety features. >> RECK: This is a safety lip barrier. And this particular product is a lip that goes on the back of the truck when servicing the truck. However, when the leveler's in the stored position, this lip is about a seven-inch high barrier to prevent a forklift from riding out through the door or through the dock down to the ground, causing a serious accident. >> NARRATOR: Other loading dock equipment includes seals and doors which save energy on heating and air conditioning. They also keep rain, dirt and debris out. Together, all the pieces of a modern loading dock help keep the traffic moving inside the truck. But for the bulk of that work, one piece of equipment towers above the rest. Forklifts and their numerous derivations are the undisputed kings of the loading dock. The people at Yale Materials Handling Corporation have been building these workhorse vehicles for nearly 80 years. >> WILLIAM GILROY: Here at Yale we build approximately 50 different models of material handling equipment. There's quite a variety. They go all the way from units purely used for horizontal movement of material to units used for both horizontal and vertical movement of materials. >> NARRATOR: Today, if you need something lifted, plucked or pulled, there's probably a perfect truck for the job. But early forklifts were far less versatile. As a matter of fact, most didn't even have forks. >> WARREN T. ECK: The early lift trucks were fairly crude. They really didn't have hydraulics like we know them today. Some of them used chains. In fact, the very early ones were just purely mechanical lifts because, don't forget, they only were designed to lift the load a few inches off the ground so it could be transported laterally. >> NARRATOR: In the early 1920s, machinists began building special motorized trucks. Because cargo came in all shapes and sizes, workers stacked the goods on the flat platform. The driver then lifted it about two feet via mechanical winch, and drove the vehicle to the waiting truck where another team of workers went about manually loading the trailer. The biggest advancement for lift trucks came only after the industry standardized the loads they were carrying. Developed in the late '30s, the standardized pallet, a simple wooden platform measuring 48 by 40 inches, revolutionized loading and unloading. Workers were able to stack loose cargo onto a pallet where it remained until reaching its destination. >> ECK: And with the advent of the pallet, uh, it also required a new method of moving them. And that's where we came up with what we know today as the forklift truck that has forks on it to go into the pallet to be able to lift that pallet up off the ground. >> NARRATOR: During the 1950s as warehouses tried to fit more cargo into smaller spaces, there was only one way to go: up. Forklifts evolved, becoming physically smaller but able to obtain greater heights. Today, these vehicles can reach up to 50 feet and use articulated loading forks to gently pluck palletized goods from even the highest shelves. But for drivers, the increased height presented new dangers. >> ECK: As we were lifting loads higher and as, uh, they were stacking more loads on a pallet, uh, there really was the possibility of one of those boxes falling off and hitting the operator on the head. And there were really no measures in the early trucks to prevent this. So, as we get into the late '50s and into the '60s, we see companies starting to look at this and coming up with some safety features such as load backrests and drivers' overhead guards. In most cases, though, these were options, not standard features. >> NARRATOR: Thanks to forklifts with greater reach... versatility... and safety advances, workers can load and unload just about everything faster than ever before. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach combine to make the busiest container port in America, and the third busiest in the world. Dockworkers push roughly 130 million metric tons of cargo valued at nearly $200 billion through the port every year. But before the goods end up in stores and factories, they must first be unloaded. APL Limited is one of the largest ocean-going shippers in the world, and their container facility at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port is one of the fastest loading docks in existence. >> NATHANIEL SEEDS: At the port of LA/Long Beach, container ships come in. We work approximately nine vessels a week here, and, uh, we're averaging about 18,000 container moves, vessel moves, on and off the ship each week. >> NARRATOR: Gantry cranes lift the cargo containers off the ships. The crane operators sit over 120 feet above the ground in moving control booths. From their vantage point, they quickly lift the containers and load them onto waiting vehicles. These specially designed trucks then move the containers into the yard for storage. >> SEEDS: The container comes off the ship, the clerk types it in, the system figures out where to park it, sends a message to the truck, go park it in row five. The driver goes out and parks it in row five, drops it there, enters a button that he's completed his mission, and receives his next work instruction automatically. >> NARRATOR: With over 10,000 containers in the yard, managers rely on that indispensable organizer of modern life: the computer. >> SEEDS: With our terminal operating system, we can analyze the storage location for every container that comes in and goes out of the facility. It's got varying degrees of detail that can be displayed on the screen at any one point in time. You can get down to an individual container with all of the shipment information, the routing information, the length, the height, the weight. >> NARRATOR: Modern logistics, uniform cargo containers and massive machinery allow dockworkers to unload even the largest ships within hours. But historically, the loading and unloading of ships took days to weeks. That's because for early civilizations, almost all labor was done by hand. Still, the loading of some ancient cargo required quite a bit of thought. Egyptian stone workers used Nile barges, possibly up to 200 feet long, to transport obelisks weighing hundreds of tons. Today, researchers disagree as to exactly how the stones were erected, let alone transported. One theory has Egyptian workers burying the floating barge in sand on the river's edge. Workers then used ropes and sledges to drag the monuments into position above the covered vessel. Once the stones were in place, laborers excavated the sand from the barge to lower the stones into the vessel. Next, they removed the sand from around the boat until it was free. What is not theoretical is that for Egypt and other ancient civilizations, the loading dock was a very labor intensive place. >> DR. JOHN JENSEN: The loading and unloading of ships was... basically involved lifting and carrying a bewildering variety of goods. You had to carry it here, carry it there, stow it very carefully. Um, and actually, there was quite a bit of skill to it, but it relied more on brawn and a little bit of human organization than it did any kind of great finesse. >> NARRATOR: Though the loading and unloading of early ships was unremarkable, the facilities utilized by early laborers were anything but. Roman ports were considered the gateways to the Empire, and Roman engineers took great pride in their construction. >> JENSEN: The development of what we consider modern harbors with specialized wharves and piers and breakwaters, we find is also quite ancient of the Roman Empire, and had access to all kinds of the top-level engineers, and the Romans were, of course, the great engineers of the era. And they have found just stunning things: giant blocks of, of masonry and cement. They would build caissons, or functionally build ships around these giant, uh, blocks, take them out into the right spot, and then sink them and drop them on the bottom. And doing that, they were able to change the whole bottom topography and create a harbor where nothing had existed before. >> NARRATOR: The harbors may have been engineering marvels, but the act of loading and unloading was still done by the earliest known technology-- human muscle. (<i> singing sea chantey</i> ) >> NARRATOR: In the era of tall sailing ships, that muscle belonged to local dockworkers known as stevedores, derived from the Spanish word<i> estivar,</i> meaning "to stow." In other places, the work fell to men who simply lived along the shore, along shore men, later referred to as longshoremen. >> JENSEN: Port towns are, then and now, are notorious for being rowdy, uh, rambunctious places with people from different cultures, different languages, different socioeconomic backgrounds, all coming together. When it took a long time for vessels to be loaded by hand, this created a big space of time where a sailor needed something to do, and that's when they came off the ships and needed the bars and visited the prostitutes. >> NARRATOR: But port towns also had a dark side. Stories circulated of shanghaied young men who passed out in pubs only to awaken as inadvertent sailors. Thievery and graft became a staple of dockside life. Many shipowners complained about the amount of cargo that was pilfered, not on yearlong voyages, but en route from ship to warehouse. >> JENSEN: Indeed, in the ancient world, as in the modern era, protecting your cargo from the crew and from longshoreman and from others that want to lift them and make a little profit is an important part of the business. The Chinese used ceramic vessels, which they would then pack with smaller ceramic vessels. Protects them from the weather, protects it from pilferage. In the 19th century, and even before, Western seafarers turned to cooperage and barrel making. Same type of thing-- protects it from the elements, protects it from pilferage. >> NARRATOR: But there was little else to be done. Loading may have been manual labor, but it took skill. For shippers, it was better to lose a little to the longshoremen than everything to the sea. >> JENSEN: If you improperly load a vessel, then or now, you're likely to have an accident. You can compromise the stability, you can overload it so it sinks when water comes onboard. So, there's all kinds of issues about loading a vessel. >> NARRATOR: While in port, captains relied on experienced locals to properly stow their goods, which involved skillfully stacking and lashing the cargo down. But on long voyages, loading of fresh provisions fell to the crew. Fortunately, the ship itself was a piece of loading dock machinery. >> MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS: This vessel was built in 1841. She's a whale ship. What we're on is a square-rigged ship, and a square-rigged ship is a vessel that has masts that go upright, and then crosspieces-- yards-- that go across, and those yards work as cranes. They're sort of built in cranes that are already on the ship, so it makes it easier for the sailors because they have that high vantage point. They can set up a block and tackle to that, and therefore lift the stuff on and off rather than try to just manhandle it, just force it up and down with the strength of their bodies. >> NARRATOR: Sailors used large cargo nets made of rope to lift all types of goods onto the ships. But one item in particular made up the bulk of the cargo. For both safety of the goods and ease of movement, the simple cask was the 19th century equivalent of the modern metal container. >> EDWARDS: It was used to contain all different types of objects. It could contain wine, water and whiskey-- the things that we normally think of carried in casks-- but it could also contain nails, apples, china packed in sawdust, toys, parts of other casks, sails. Just about everything. And the reason that it was so wonderful was in the days before forklifts, it can be rolled, it can be rolled with two hands, one hand, one finger. It can be turned on a dime, it can easily turn around, it can be rocked from side to side, rocking so fast that you can practically get it to jump up and stand on its edge, and it can be rolled along its edge, so it's an incredible shape, and it was used in the 19th century, but its an ancient shape that was used all the back to the time of the Egyptians. >> NARRATOR: By its very shape, the barrel was a tool unto itself-- part wheel and part lever. But as amazing as it was, sailors still relied on strong hands and backs to get them on board. But by the early 19th century, the power of steam was beginning to change all that. >> JENSEN: But the adoption of steam for hoisting mechanisms changes the game to a great degree. All of a sudden, you don't have to have seven men to pull on a rope to move a bucket. A steam boiler and an engine can do it better and cheaper and faster. >> NARRATOR: But steam power was more than just a catalyst for speed. For over a century, dockworkers faced both the challenge of mechanization and the right to organize. The confrontation would lead to some of the bloodiest days on the docks. On July 5, 1934, near the San Francisco waterfront, police fired on brick-throwing strikers. Two men were killed and nearly 80 wounded in what would become known as "Bloody Thursday." Public outcry against the brutality strengthened the workers' cause. By the 1950s, the longshoremen had the upper hand, and their union had become one of the strongest in the nation. Those on the waterfront became the poster boys for blue collar working America. >> GLENN GORDINIER: In the 1950s, you would have teams of longshoremen, eight men in a gang, assigned to a hold. And so these men, in packing the goods, had to work as teams, uh, to get it in there safely and effectively so it wouldn't shift during the voyage, and then also work as effectively and safely to get it out without damaging themselves or the goods. So, it was a great, great deal of camaraderie, teamwork, a lot of imagination and creativity, right in that hold working as gangs. >> NARRATOR: Despite the close- knit working environment, the gangs had to remain vigilant. >> GORDINIER: Working down in a cargo hold could be very dangerous. If you were breaking out a cargo, you, in fact, were relying on the skill of the men who had loaded that cargo somewhere else in the world, because a vessel rolls in a seaway-- ten-foot, 15-foot, 25- foot seas-- get a vessel rolling and pitching, and those goods could shift, um, if they're not well stowed, and as you try to break it out, disaster could loom. >> NARRATOR: But by the late 1970s, the introduction of containerization had changed everything, and resurrected an old rivalry-- man versus machine. In 2002, a west coast shipping lockout cost the U.S. economy an estimated $1 to $2 billion a day. At the heart of the issue was the age-old tumult over jobs lost to mechanization, but containerization clearly offered benefits. >> GORDINIER: It did several things. It certainly sped up the process, uh, where vessels might be days or weeks in port. Now they spend hours in port. They can take a two-week voyage and time it down to 15 minutes, moving goods on and off. Um, it saved money enormously. >> NARRATOR: But today many worry that the money saved may have come at the cost of security. Only three percent of the containers that enter the US are physically inspected, leaving many lawmakers to wonder what's really coming through the nation's ports. Congress is attempting to put over a billion dollars into cargo scanners and additional port protection. Critics contend even that won't be enough to ensure safety. But with billions at stake, one thing is sure. These loading docks will have to continue to operate, because they've become an indispensable part of the world's economy. Every day in the US, nearly six million tons of goods are shipped by rail. But many rail workers never get to see what they're moving. As with other forms of transportation, the sealed steel container has revolutionized the railroad loading dock. Rail workers at the Eagle Marine intermodal container transfer facility connected to the Los Angeles/Long Beach harbor put together two or more trains a day. Each can carry 200 containers, which means this facility loads and unloads up to 2,000 containers every week. Steel containers may be new, but freight has been loaded on train cars almost since the first trains rolled down the tracks. >> COURTNEY B. WILSON: Right around 1830, 1831, you see the beginnings of, of freight cars being developed, and experiments beginning on different types. >> NARRATOR: But early rail workers faced the same problem that plagued other forms of transportation: back-breaking labor. >> WILSON: One of the disadvantages is that the surface that goods were loaded on was much higher than the ground and at the very beginning it basically was manpower that struggled, uh, whether it be hog's heads or crates or whatever, off a flat car, uh, down to the ground. >> NARRATOR: Fortunately for early loading dockworkers, the struggle would soon end. >> WILSON: About 1845, leading up to 1850 in the big city passenger depots, we see the creation of the platform. This was used not only for people, but also for freight. A platform was a structure, meant to elevate a flat surface at the same level as the door of a box car or a passenger car or a freight car. So it's easy then, instead of hefting materials out of the side of a box car, down to the ground, to unload them on this platform, at the end of which was a long ramp, which a wheeled vehicle like a hand truck or a wagon could easily negotiate. >> NARRATOR: Where platforms weren't available, workers used pushcarts for boxes and trunks small enough to be moved by hand. >> STAN KAZMAREK: Here are some early examples of baggage carts and the freight and equipment that was loaded upon them. These were usually taken outside the station, they were loaded from vehicles, whether it be wagon or truck, placed upon the cart here, which got them to a reasonable height, so they could be transloaded into the door of the baggage car. >> NARRATOR: But in time, the railroad would be used to carry a far heavier burden. The American Civil War was one of the first major conflicts to rely heavily on modern transportation. New loading dock technology would forever change both railroads and the face of war. >> WILSON: During the Civil War, the use of cranes for instance to unload heavy machinery, whether it was going to a, a gun factory or perhaps a cannon factory or something that had to do with the war, it was important, so we find the erection of permanent cranes next to railroad depots and in railroad yards, becoming a part of the landscape. >> NARRATOR: Shortly after the war, on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, dignitaries drove the last and golden spike of the transcontinental railroad-- an ever-expanding web of tracks spread across the nation. The railroad's speed and efficiency had a profound effect on the mining industry. Mine owners throughout the country began to work numerous ore, mineral and coal deposits once deemed inaccessible. >> WILSON: Coal mines were developed so that the chutes out of the mine itself were at an elevated level. So, it was actually a teeny railroad that brought the coal in small bins up out of the mine, and then these little coal bins were dumped into the freight cars of the pot hoppers from above. >> NARRATOR: Industrialists toyed with faster ways to unload dry bulk goods from train cars. This 1890s film shows rail workers loading an ore car into a giant spinning drum. The machine physically flips the train car over to dump its contents. But in the end rail car designers chose a simple force of nature over elaborate machinery. >> KAZMAREK: This is a standard steel open-top hopper car. Its primary cargo would be coal, second to that would be iron ore. It could be pressed and serviced to carry wood chips and sand. This car was opened by means of a jackson bar through these thongs located here. By this means, this car would be placed upon a ramp, these dumps would be opened, and by force of gravity, the load would dump out of the car onto a loading truck or gravel pit, or such like that. >> NARRATOR: New loading dock designs allowed different forms of transportation to work together. In the Great Lakes region, mining and ships had evolved hand in hand, but in the late 19th century trains were added to the equation. JOHN JENSEN: The rails were integrated into the docking systems. Um, the railroad cars would carry just tons and tons of ore, which would be stored in hoppers that were part of the docks. The vessels would come alongside, moor up next to the docks, and specialized chutes would come down that were just the right size for the, the hatches on the vessels. And so, whereas years before it would have taken sometimes weeks to load hundreds of tons of ore, they could do it in, in just a few hours. >> NARRATOR: But not all goods are so... dry. >> WILSON: All kinds of liquids needed to be moved by the rails. As the 20th century arrived, we also see the development of the tank car. This was an enclosed cylinder put on a flat car. It was basically gravity that loaded a tank car, however, a person would have to climb up on top to attach the nozzle. So if you look at a tank car today, you'll see a series of ladders and platforms for personnel to walk on, so that they can open and close the traps, attach the nozzles, and make sure that the goods got in without any leakage. >> NARRATOR: Over the next 50 years, railroad loading docks moved the American war machine, fed thriving industries and delivered the rewards of a booming peacetime economy. But by the 1960s, trucks, due to their greater versatility, became the prime movers in ground transportation. The railroads were in trouble. >> WILSON: But then, towards the 1970s, and through the '80s, we began to develop a system called intermodal. And intermodal melds ships and trains and trucks all together. >> NARRATOR: The intermodal system allowed trains to remain an integral part of ground transportation. Today, there are train cars for every imaginable application. With coal representing nearly 50% of all goods carried by rail, the two industries have to work closely together. Filled by conveyor, these giant silos are really coal-loading docks. As the train pulls in, tons of coal quickly pour into the empty cars. Railroads utilize flat cars, well cars, special coiled steel transporters, auto racks and of course container carriers, each with their own loading dock requirements. With nearly 40% of American goods shipped by train, rail yards remain some of the busiest loading docks in the country. The airplane has revolutionized the shipping industry... and today UPS is at the forefront of that revolution. Everyday, UPS moves 13½ million packages. In 2002, to keep up with their growing business, UPS opened their world port facility in Louisville, Kentucky. It's the world's largest aircraft loading dock. Pilots pull their airplanes directly up to the billion- dollar facility. 44 planes can be serviced simultaneously inside what is really a four-million-square- foot machine. Workers place incoming packages onto a sorting system made up of over 122 miles of conveyor belts. Every hour, the facility handles over 300,000 packages. >> JACK BLAISDELL: The process we're working right now is this is an arriving aircraft. It's just arrived. We have two crews. The first crew is on the aircraft itself. They're releasing the latches from the cargo containers. They'll move the containers forward, place them onto the unload device. >> NARRATOR: Aircraft designers have developed special cargo containers that utilize every inch of space inside the plane. >> BLAISDELL: We're on the main deck of a Boeing 767. This is our cargo system that we use to load the containers. When the containers are pulled in here, they travel on these balls, so they move smoothly over the main deck. The edge of the container is captured by this lock on this side, and on the rail on the other side it also captures it, keeping it from floating up and down. >> NARRATOR: Airport workers use a K-loader, which is a type of platform elevator, to lower the containers to the ground. A second crew then sorts and moves the containers into the facility. The ground crew gets help from some very special loading dock equipment. >> BLAISDELL: What we're looking at right now is the staging area, the grating in the staging area. It's studded with these inverted casters. They're allowed to spin around in this direction. They're also allowed to roll. And what that allows to happen is these containers, which weigh about 4,000 or 5,000 pounds-- typically are pushed around with two people, but even one person-- just once you get the thing started, this is a full container, weighs 4,000 or 5,000 pounds, you can see how easy it is to move. >> NARRATOR: Inside the massive facility, workers unload every package onto feeder conveyor belts. >> BLAISDELL: This is one of the containers we just saw taken off the aircraft. We've only had to move it about 50 feet to get it in position in one of the unload areas. There's 175 such unload areas here. It allows us to move these packages into the building. We can put the packages on the parcel systems you see here. As you can see, it's a pretty busy area. It's one of the most active areas that we have in the building. >> NARRATOR: Scanners read and record the information off every package's shipping slip. The information technology allows the computerized conveyor system to move each package to its new loading area where workers put them back into containers for the next leg of their travels. >> JOHN McDEVITT: The automation aspect is-is extremely unique. Uh, basically, the only human beings that touch the packages are at the unload and the load positions. Once a package is inducted into the facility, everything else is driven off of the smart label, which means it's electronically read data that guides that package throughout the system, and puts it in the proper container for outbound dispatch. >> NARRATOR: It wasn't always so easy. >> McDEVITT: In the early days of air cargo, everything was manual. Uh, basically loading and, uh, the sortation of the packages were folks just loading in the bags of, uh, merchandise and putting them on prop planes, uh, for delivery to their destinations. >> NARRATOR: As early as 1911, the US Post Office began to offer airmail and contracted outside companies to fly the planes. By the late '20s, many were using Douglas M-2 biplanes for the job. The cargo containers, located between the pilot and the engine, held nearly 1,000 pounds of mail. But as with all planes of the era, everything had to be painstakingly loaded by hand. (<i> propeller airplane idling</i> ) Over the next 15 years, aircraft improvements allowed pilots to carry larger loads more efficiently. But it wasn't until the onset of World War II that the world began to see the airplanes' true transport potential. >> WARREN T. ECK: With World War II, you now had the need to move millions of tons of supplies in order to support the war effort: ammunition, food, clothing. Everything you could think of that they needed to support an army had to be moved. >> NARRATOR: The US Air Transport Command was created on June 20, 1942. Over the course of the war, ATC pilots delivered over one million tons of vital military equipment. Still, the loading dock work was right out of the Stone Age, even though the airplanes were on the verge of the Jet Age. Jet power allowed airplanes to become truly viable cargo carriers. One of the first to recognize the jet's cargo carrying potential was the US Air Force. In the early '60s, the Pentagon commissioned the C-141. The loading dock had been built right into the plane. An early version of a roller floor system, and forklifts specially designed for the aircraft, allowed airmen to quickly load pallets containing weapons and supplies. But the speed and ease of loading paled in comparison to the delivery system. Parachutes could be attached to everything. When the C-141 was over the drop site, airmen opened the rear of the plane and pushed everything out. The receiving dock was anywhere the plane flew. Today, the military's innovation has become big businesses' mainstay. The interplay between modern airplane loading docks and aircraft means nearly anything can be shipped to the ends of the earth within hours. As factory owners and manufacturers become more dependent on an uninterrupted stream of goods, the line between loading dock and warehouse becomes less defined. Until recently, industry personnel discussed warehouses in terms of size and storage capacity. Now "throughput" and "supply stream" are the buzzwords. Today, many warehouses are centralized hubs where goods are transferred in an operation known as cross-docking. >> DOUG OLSON: A cross-dock operation is designed to, to distribute. It's designed to sort. That's all it does. It is not designed to warehouse goods for any length of time at all. As a matter of fact, the efficiency of a cross-docking operation is measured in the number of pieces that are handled in any given period of time. >> NARRATOR: To keep the material moving, modern warehouse workers have many tools at their disposal. Simple winches, dollies and pushcarts share the floor with state-of-the-art lift trucks and pallet movers. Warehouse designers are always looking for ways to speed up the process. >> ROY FREAS: You may have 2,000 cartons or more on the trailer. You want to unload them quickly and account for them. So what we see today is that we'll put a conveyer on the dock that actually extends into the trailer. It may even change elevation making the unloading operation easy. >> NARRATOR: But designers use some of the highest-tech gadgetry long before the warehouse is even built. Computer-aided drafting or CAD systems allow warehouse builders to glimpse the future. >> OLSON: We can use the CAD system to test our design. It can be exported electronically to a simulation program. The simulation program allows us to put movement on the system. We can actually show the product moving on the conveyors. >> NARRATOR: The designers' goal is to use the computers to troubleshoot any flaws. But the computers aren't relegated to the design process. Computerized warehouse and automatic storage and retrieval systems are currently being developed. Inside these new facilities computer-controlled vehicles are beginning to do the jobs once performed by humans. >> TERRY BROD: A revolution in technology on the docks is the AGVS or Automatic Guided Vehicle. You could even call it a robot. There's no man involved. We have the equivalent of a truck that has the ability to memorize the facility layout. >> NARRATOR: Sensors on the vehicle interact with stationary beacons or onboard mapping software to make sure the machine finds its target. The industry's ultimate goal is the lights-out facility. Like something out of a science fiction novel, inside the warehouse of the future the computers and machines will store, sort, retrieve and load goods without human interaction. >> OLSON: I could envision someday there being a robotic device, a C-3PO for example, that would meet a carton and have the intelligence to take that item and find the next available, appropriate place in the truck to load it. That would be my vision. Are we close to that today? I think with enough money and energy, we could probably build the system. But is the cost justified? Probably not today. >> NARRATOR: The term "lights out" is literal: machines don't need light to see. Unlike the loading docks of old which were the sole domain of hard-working laborers, the loading docks of the future won't even be visible to the human eye... at least the ones here on Earth. Even astronauts depend on loading docks. To live in space, every necessity must be delivered by rocket. Despite the high-tech delivery system and nature of space stations, astronauts, like many dockworkers on Earth, must unload most of the cargo by hand. Of course it's much easier when the packages weigh nothing. The biggest problem for an astronaut is maneuvering the packages within the confined spaces and keeping everything under control. The best system thus far is a space age version of the bucket brigade. Astronauts position themselves along the line of transfer and toss the cargo to one another. In a strange backwards step, the pinnacle of high-tech loading docks relies on the earliest form of technology: human muscle. <font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00"> A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by <font color="#00FFFF"> Media Access Group at WGBH</font> access.wgbh.org
