7 Fascinating Facts about the Achievements of Andrew Carnegie
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a number of American entrepreneurs and industrialists rose to prominence due to their wealth and power, but also because of their influence on society, politics, and everyday life. And some, like Scottish-born steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, earned a reputation for philanthropy that has endured for generations.
1. Shaped by poverty.
Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835. His father was a hand-loom weaver displaced by technological advancements brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The family’s finances were devastated after Carnegie’s father refused to work in local factories, and the household sank into poverty. Carnegie loved his hapless father, but especially revered his mother and her fierce dedication to hard work and to ensuring a better future for her children.
Carnegie would remember for the rest of his life the times when he stood outside a magnificent local estate, looking in through its gates as his schoolmates played on its grounds on the one day of the year when the owners opened it to the public. Members of his family were notorious for their egalitarian views promoting the rights of the working class, but young Andrew and his brother were denied the privilege. This snub reinforced his growing passion for liberty and equality.
Carnegie’s mother started a small store in hopes of making ends meet. It was she who insisted on the family’s emigration to the United States in 1848. After they settled in a slum in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, 13-year-old Carnegie earned a little over a dollar a week as a worker in a thread factory. His own formal education was over.
2. A young entrepreneur.
In 1849, Carnegie found a job as a messenger and later a telegrapher for a Pittsburgh telegraph office, where he eventually earned $20 a month. Four years later, he became secretary and personal telegrapher for Pennsylvania Railroad executive Thomas Scott, who became a valued mentor to him. When Carnegie was 20, his father died, and he became the family breadwinner. Carnegie began to invest his earnings and took out a loan to invest in the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company. His dividends from these investments soon brought him $5,000 a year in dividends. He would go on to facilitate a merger between Woodruff and the Pullman Palace Car Company in one of his first major business deals.
3. An appreciation for education.
Throughout his life, Andrew Carnegie possessed a voracious appetite for learning and spent many hours reading. During his family’s passage in steerage across the Atlantic, he learned everything he could about the ship, helping the sailors and often sharing meals with them. During his years as a messenger boy, he earned renown for memorizing every house and businessman who lived along his route. With a group of young friends, he created a debate society. A literature enthusiast, he hung around local theaters learning all the lines in Shakespeare’s plays. He taught himself Morse Code and became one of the few telegraphers who could transcribe the messages immediately, simply by listening to the dots and dashes.
Carnegie also loved libraries. As a working teen, he found himself suddenly barred from the local library when a new rule stated that patrons must be enrolled in school. A letter he wrote to the newspaper was instrumental in getting libraries opened to all the youth of Pittsburgh.
4. Management experience.
Before he was 25, Carnegie became superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s western regional office, where he earned enough to move his beloved mother to a comfortable suburb. At the start of the Civil War, Thomas Scott became Assistant Secretary of War for the Union, and Carnegie became Superintendent of the Military Railways, which taught him the value of iron products for a growing national economy.
5. An emerging industrialist.
In 1864, Carnegie invested in a Pennsylvania oil field, which soon earned him $1 million. He purchased his first Pittsburgh steel mill and became a partner in the Keystone Bridge Company, setting himself on the course to enormous wealth and fame. By age 30, he had resigned from the Pennsylvania Railroad to concentrate on his own business interests.
6. Building the nation’s infrastructure.
Carnegie’s aptitude for innovation led his companies to a string of profitable triumphs. At his Homestead Steel Works factory, he successfully instituted the Bessemer process, which made mass production of steel more cost-effective.
The ongoing achievements of the Carnegie Steel Company helped the United States grow its network of bridges and skyscrapers, making their production both cheaper and more efficient. He pioneered vertical integration, buying his own coal fields to produce fuel for his factories, as well as ships and railways to transport the steel they produced. By the close of the 1880s, U.S. production of steel had overtaken that of Great Britain, largely due to Carnegie’s company.
In 1874, Keystone Bridge Works completed the first bridge to span the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Eads Bridge is still a working piece of public infrastructure. In 1878, Carnegie Steel won a contract to help construct the Brooklyn Bridge.
7. Giving back to his country that gave him his start.
In 1901, Carnegie retired from business and turned his full-time interest to giving away his vast fortune to improve the lives of others.
An admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Carnegie had maintained a lifelong focus on social justice, education, and the promotion of peace. After selling the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan for a sum approaching $500 million, he started numerous nonprofits that are still in existence, including Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In 1903, Carnegie handwrote a note establishing the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust with the purpose of enriching the lives of people living in the town of his birth. Today, the trust administers public programs that further education, culture and the arts, sports and recreational activities, and community welfare projects.
Carnegie made major contributions to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, as well as to the New York City Public Library. His donations helped New York to expand its branch library system, and they funded close to 3,000 other public libraries in the U.S. and beyond.
