Newest Inch

Into the paneled office of Manhattan's J. P. Morgan & Co. Inc. last week trooped a bunch of happy Texans. There they put the final seal on the biggest private deal in the history of natural gas: the financing of a new $193 million pipeline to pump gas from Hidalgo County, on the Rio Grande, to Manhattan's 132nd Street.

The 1,825-mile pipeline was the brain child of Houston's Ray C. Fish, 46, president of Fish Engineering Corp., who had built the Tennessee Gas Transmission pipeline, and Claude A. Williams, an .unsuccessful bidder for the Government's Big Inch. Once they had steered their Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Corp. past the Federal Power Commission in Washington, the rest was smooth sailing.

A group of insurance companies snapped up $143 million worth of Transcontinental bonds. Another $26.5 million came from the sale of notes, convertible into preferred stock after the pipeline is completed. The rest came from common stock privately sold for $10 a share.

For their enterprise, Fish, Pipeline President Williams and the group of original promoters already had a fat paper profit. To start, they had put up $11,600,000 in all, for 1,610,000 shares of common stock, thus getting it at $7.20 a share. As the rest of the common stock which was sold went for $10 a share, they already had a paper profit of close to $4.5 million.

Transcontinental hopes to deliver 340 million cu. ft. of gas a day, at a cost of approximately 31-c- per 1,000 cu. ft. This is so far below the present cost of manufactured gas in New York that nine utility companies in the metropolitan area have already signed up as customers.

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