As the container shipping industry continues to boom ... This Wall Street Journal brief history series helps explain the now, by looking back at how we got here.

On an average day in the Port of New York and New Jersey, about 4,000 shipping containers—lined end to end, they would stretch 15 miles—are lifted off freighters and released into the arteries ...

Roughly two years on, a majority of the shipping containers that once formed a barrier wall at Arizona's southern border are still for sale.