private sector following World War II. Conversion by TETCO TETCO was the brainchild of corporate lawyers Charles Francis and James Elkins, who convinced the construction specialists George and Herman Brown, and the fuel engineer E. Holley Poe, that buying the Big and Little Inch pipelines could be a lucrative opportunity. The corporation was established specifically for the purposes of the bid, and came to their bidding figure by estimating that the likely competition would bid at $130 million; their own figure exceeded this by 10 percent, and added on $127,000 to avoid a suspiciously round number. TETCO believed it could afford to make this offer because it intended to reuse the electric motors in the oil pumping mechanisms for moving the natural gas; it also believed that the price of gas would rise considerably in the post-war markets. After winning the bidding, TETCO raised the money to pay the government through a combination of bonds and share issues. A further government enquiry was required before the sale was allowed to go through, which was complicated by the reluctance of the state of Pennsylvania to allow the pipelines to be used to pump gas east through its territory. The government of Pennsylvania was influenced by the coal industry, who feared they would lose sales, but it eventually relented and the sale of the pipelines to TETCO was finally completed on November 1. The value of the company soared, and the original investors saw the value of their holdings increase 63-fold. TETCO immediately began to convert the pipelines for permanent use as natural gas transmission lines, under the direction of Baxter Goodrich, their chief engineer. 24 compressor stations were constructed along the pipeline with centrifugal compressors, increasing the capacity of the system to of gas a day, and the old oil pumps were retained for reuse in a future crisis. Steel valves replaced the older, less reliable cast iron designs. Demand continued to increase, requiring additional compressor capability, and by January 1949 the pipelines were moving a day. The supply route undermined the local markets for manufactured gas, and the major cities of the north-east rapidly converted to the use of natural gas; historian David Waples describes how the pipelines contributed to "an extraordinary expansion of natural gas customers and gas company employees after World War II". The Inch pipelines encouraged the development of further long distance pipelines in the US through