Before 1956, a ship was packed the way you pack a car for a holiday. Sacks, crates, barrels and bales, each lifted and fitted in by hand, 21 or 22 men to a hold. Loading a ship took days. Then Malcom McLean put 58 truck boxes on a converted tanker, the Ideal X, and sailed it from Newark to Houston. Loading costs fell by 97%. The box wasn't clever. It was the same box everywhere. By 1968 its sizes were a world standard, and in 2021 the world's ports moved the equivalent of 849 million twenty-foot boxes.
Loading a ton of cargo, 1956
LEGO did the same with a toy. In 1958 it filed a patent for one way to join its bricks: studs on top, tubes underneath. Every brick since has kept it, so a brick made today still clicks into one made in 1958. That one rule is the whole trick. Six ordinary 2x4 bricks can be joined in 915,103,765 ways. Nobody designed those ways. They all come from the one rule every brick follows.