of Tapline it was necessary to transport Middle East oil in tankers down the Persian Gulf, through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and then through the privately-owned Suez Canal. That meant a 20-day, 7000-mile round trip for the tankers and a Canal toll of 18 cents a barrel or $40,000 for the oil in each big modern tank ship.

The men who first saw the benefits to be gained from a pipe line across Arabia had to put that project into the background to deal with the war and the great expansion projects which came with peace. But at the same time there were developments which slowly but surely led to fulfillment of those early plans.

During the war there was the great adventure of the Little Inch and Big Inch pipe line from the Texas oil fields to the industrial northeast. It has been said that without the Big and Little Inch pipe lines D-Day in Normandy would have had to be postponed a full year.

In early 1944 a recommendation was made by United States military authorities for the construction of a trans-Arabian pipe line as a project of the wartime Petroleum Reserves Corporation. This proposal did not materialize but Aramco's parent companies made a careful engineering study of the pipe line project. It was decided that a pipe line half-again as big in diameter as the Big Inch might be laid across the barren wastes of the northern Arabia steppes and on across the coastal mountains to the Mediterranean.

Aramco, until December of 1948, was owned by the Standard Oil Company of California and The Texas Company. The Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Company was chartered as a Delaware corporation in July, 1945, with the same ownership as Aramco. On Dec. 2, 1948, Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) and the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, Inc. were added to the Aramco partnership. At the same time they acquired participating shares in Tapline.

Under this new alignment there began the intensive planning without which any great project must fail. First there was the pipe line engineering study and also there was the question of leadership. In both these situations and, as became the case all along the burning road from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, typical American genius took