THIS is the story of the modern world, of the way we live today. It's a big story, a global story, but it could be shortened to just four letters: TEUs.

You may have noticed them on Tuesday's front page. They cropped up in the report about the Government's long-awaited ports strategy. The Government predicts that all the TEUs the country needs can be handled by the three deep sea container ports in the south. Therefore, there will be no TEUs for a new container port at Teesport to handle.

With one document, the Government jeopardises a £300m investment which would create 5,500 jobs, and it overheats the south even more.

To understand all this, we have to go back exactly 50 years to April 25, 1956, when a trucker called Malcolm McLean loaded 58 trailers onto a boat at Port Newark in New Jersey and sailed them to Texas.

McLean had been inspired by watching sweating workers transporting bales of cotton - all regular sizes fitting tightly into regular shaped lorries - and he had invented the first container ship.

Without their lorry chassis, the trailers were a standard size and they slotted together perfectly on the ship without any wasted space. Having reached Texas, they were dropped onto another lorry chassis or into a railway wagon, and - without being opened - were whisked away to their new owner.

The trailers turned into purpose-built containers and as the idea caught on around the world, their size needed to be standardised. They are all 8ft wide and 8ft 6ins long, but come in variable lengths.

The early containers were 20ft long, and so the TEU - 20ft equivalent unit - became the term for their measurement. Increasingly today, containers are growing to 40ft long, so they are technically known as 2TEUs (although as 20ft becomes obsolete, some people are using FEU as the new measure - the 40ft equivalent unit).

McLean founded a company called Sea-Land which is now part of Maersk which moves more TEUs around the world than any other company.

There are 18 million TEUs bobbing around the seven seas making 200 million trips a year.

They sail on 3,600 container ships. Each vessel can hold 7,000 TEUs, although a new generation will hold 13,000 TEUs. They will be 190ft wide and a quarter-of-a-mile long - probably the largest dimensions that the world's crowded shipping lanes like the Straits of Malacca can accommodate.

By packing such vast quantities of goods into TEUs, the transport costs become minimal. A bottle of wine costs 10p to sail in a TEU from Australia; a pound of coffee costs 3p from Central America (so why it costs more than £100 to transport a person from Darlington to London on the railway is anyone's guess).

The TEU, then, has created globalisation. It is the globe's conveyor belt. In terms of cost, it has made the world a tiny place.

Today, 26 per cent of TEUs begin their journeys in China. China is the globe's manufactory; the conveyor belt carries the goods cheaply to the consumers in the US or Europe where everyone spends Christmas wondering how it can be financially viable for the Chinese to make so many utterly useless bits of plastic to go in our crackers.

So, start spreading the TEUs. This is how it's done.