The Big Inch: The Wartime Pipeline That Beat the U-Boats

The tanker Byron D. Benson, torpedoed by a German U-boat off North Carolina in April 1942 while carrying crude oil from Texas to New Jersey. National Archives.

Drive north from NIST's campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland, past the Mason-Dixon Line, and you soon cross another historic line: the Inch Lines. Despite the name, they run more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from Texas to New Jersey. Built during the Second World War, they inspired a saying: "The war was won by an Inch."

An engineer who measured flow

The story begins with William Gillum Heltzel (1895–1959). After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1918, he took his first job in the Electrical Measuring Instruments section of the National Bureau of Standards, today's NIST. About a year later he joined the oil industry as a pipeline engineer — and was surprised to find that pipelines were designed by rules of thumb, without the precise measurement he was used to.

He set out to change that. Starting in 1926 with "Fluid Flow and Friction in Pipelines" in the Oil & Gas Journal, he published a science-based method of pipeline design and some of the earliest usable flow formulas, still basic to the field. They made it possible to pump oil efficiently through much larger and longer pipes. For years, though, nobody needed pipes that big.

The U-boat problem

Oil fuelled and lubricated the planes, tanks and machines of war, and the United States produced 60 percent of the world's crude, while Nazi Germany had little of its own. But 95 percent of America's petroleum products moved by sea, in tankers from the Texas Gulf Coast to the refineries of the Northeast. In July 1940 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned President Roosevelt that a Texas-to-East pipeline, though perhaps not economical, "might be absolutely necessary" in an emergency.

The emergency came fast. In February 1942 alone, German submarines sank 12 U.S. oil tankers off the East Coast. The surviving tankers were moved to the defended convoy route across the Atlantic, and trains and river barges tried to make up the difference — but where ships had brought East Coast refiners some 300,000 barrels a day, trains and barges managed 140,000. The historian Michael Gannon judged the 1942 U-boat campaign in American waters a greater strategic setback than Pearl Harbor.

The Big Inch

The government paid for the longest and largest pipeline yet built, officially the War Emergency Pipeline, running through 10 states from Baytown, Texas, to Linden, New Jersey. It was really two pipelines side by side: a 24-inch (60 cm) line for crude oil and a 20-inch (50 cm) line for refined products. Most pipelines then were no more than 8 inches across, and anything over a foot was a "big inch" pipe, so the workers named the crude line the Big Inch and the other the Little Big Inch.

The Big Inch being laid through Pennsylvania, 1942–43. Library of Congress.

Construction began in June 1942 and finished exactly a year later. The Inch Lines then delivered more than 500,000 barrels of oil a day, all over land, out of reach of the U-boats.

A wartime poster on the importance of oil. National Archives.

The project rested on Heltzel's earlier measurement work, and both he and NIST advised on it. When he died in 1959, an industry publication wrote that nothing in pipeline history had contributed so much as his "concept of rational pipeline design". The Inch Lines kept pumping after the war and are still in use; in 1998 they were added to the National Register of Historic Places for their wartime role and as an outstanding feat of engineering.

Sources

• National Institute of Standards and Technology, "The Big Inch: Fueling America's WWII War Effort," Taking Measure blog; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Images from the National Archives and the Library of Congress; a 1941 painting by a German artist is left out.