TIME CLOCK

JET planes now account for more than half of U.S. plane production. U.S. planebuilders announced last week that they had already delivered the 10,000th jet plane and the 40,000th jet engine so far built for the Air Force.

THE $70 million fire at General Motors' Livonia transmission plant (TIME, Aug. 24) will cost G.M. 75,000 cars this year, about 2 1/2% of its scheduled 1953 output. Chevrolet cannot make enough Powerglide transmissions to supply Pontiac, and Buick cannot fill all of Cadillac's needs for Dynaflow transmissions. But the fire will not affect G.M.'s 1954 models, which will use transmissions made in rented quarters at Willow Run.

PRICES of gasoline are probably headed downward. Huge stocks, now 22% higher than last year, are beginning to force price cuts at wholesale. Some brokers are trimming prices a half-cent a gallon, and refiners, who have maintained their prices so far, may have to follow suit after Labor Day.

BRANIFF International Airways, whose routes in the Midwest run north-south, is edging into the rich east-west passenger trade. Under a new agreement signed with United Air Lines, Braniff passengers bound for Portland and Seattle will not have to change planes at Denver; the same plane, with United crews, will continue on to the Pacific Northwest. In return, Braniff crews will take United planes from Denver to Dallas and Houston. The airline has a similar deal in the works with T.W.A. for through service to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

H GARDINER Symonds' threat to blow up the New England natural gas "truce" unless he won access to the Canadian market (TIME, Aug. 17) got results. In return for sharing New England with Algonquin Gas,

Symonds' Tennessee Gas Transmission Co. last week won the Federal Power Commission's O.K. to export gas to Canada.

WITH farm prices down 13% since last year, farmers are borrowing less and spending less. Non-real estate loans to farmers in 1953's first half dropped 7% and are still going down--the first time such loans have decreased in ten years.

TO pay its federal taxes for the first half of 1953, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. set aside $233 million, $7,000,000 more than it paid its 90,000 employees in wages.

ANGLO-Iranian Oil Co., kicked out of Iran by Mossadegh (TIME, Oct. 8, 1951), now hopes to get back its stake there from the Shah, but is hedging the bet. A director, John Mellor Pattinson, has spent three weeks sniffing for new opportunities in oil-rich Alberta, has worked up plans for Anglo-Iranian's first venture in Canada. The company will also start drilling in Sicily shortly.

NEW farm-surplus headaches are in store for Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson next year. Acreage controls could take nearly 34 million acres out of corn, cotton and wheat production, but only a few farmers can afford to let them lie idle. Many will plant other crops, such as flaxseed, soybeans and sugar beets, already in more than ample supply.

OPEN-hearth furnaces, which produce 89% of the nation's steel, may be outmoded. Pittsburgh's Ba-telle Memorial Institute, after a two-year study, predicts that by 1975 about 760 electric furnaces could produce just as much steel as the 950 existing open hearths, and for $50 less an ingot ton. Switchover is beginning. Detroit's smallish McLouth Steel Corp. has on order a 200-ton capacity electric furnace, bigger than any now operating.

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