When Carnegie built his first steel mill, he named it after Thomson.Ĭarnegie’s business philosophy was simple. Edgar Thomson, the railroad’s president, and the railroad was soon his best customer. But he was careful to maintain close relationships with Thomas Scott and J. He left the employ of the Pennsylvania Railroad to devote himself full time to overseeing the production of iron and steel. By that time, steel was the measure of a country’s industrial might, and Carnegie was primarily responsible for American strength in steel production. Twenty years later, it produced 11,227,000 tons, more than England and Germany combined. In 1860, the United States had produced only 13,000 tons of steel. Steel quickly began to replace wrought iron in such things as railroad rails and structural beams. Then in 1857, the English engineer Henry Bessemer developed a way to make steel in large quantities at a fraction of the old price. Before the 1850s, steel could be made only in small batches and was so expensive that it was limited to specialized applications like sword blades and precision tools, despite being much more versatile and stronger than wrought iron. He invested in iron works and saw potential in the future of steel.Ĭarnegie was right. Mentored by Scott, who helped him start investing, often in insider deals, Carnegie was a rich man by the end of the Civil War. By 1859, when he was 24 years old, Carnegie was put in charge of the Western Division of the railroad and was earning $1,500 a year, a middle-class income. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who hired him as his personal telegrapher at $4.00 a week. He resolved that if he ever became rich, he would give other working boys the same opportunity.Ī tireless worker, Carnegie came to the attention of Thomas A. There he met Colonel James Anderson, who let working boys borrow books from his personal library, a privilege Carnegie used to the full. He soon mastered telegraphy, learning to “read” messages by ear, and was promoted to operator. In 1849, Carnegie went to work at the Ohio Telegraph Company, earning $2.00 a week as a messenger boy. Andrew Carnegie, pictured here in his later years, lived a true rags-to-riches story by transforming himself from a poor Scottish immigrant into one of the country’s wealthiest men. With his formal education, such as it was, at an end, he found work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, earning $1.20 for laboring 12 hours a day, six days a week. Under the leadership of Carnegie’s strong-willed mother, the family emigrated to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1848, when Andrew was 13 years old. But when the weaving of cloth was mechanized in the 1840s, the Carnegies became impoverished. Morgan and Company.Īndrew Carnegie had been born in 1835 in a one-room house in Dunfermline, Scotland, the son of a handloom weaver. By the 1870s, Morgan was a partner in the Wall Street firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company and acted as the New York agent for his father’s bank, which was headquartered in London. He was well educated, having attended the English High School in Boston and then University of Göttingen in Germany. Morgan and the grandson of the founder of Aetna Insurance Company. Morgan had been born rich in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1837, the son of international banker J. Morgan and Carnegie could hardly have come from more different backgrounds.

Steel was the culmination of an era of American industrial consolidation that made many fear such corporations were becoming too powerful, financially and politically, and thereby threatened American democracy. To get a sense of how big a sum that was at the turn of the twentieth century, consider that the federal government that year spent only $517 million. Steel or simply Big Steel, was capitalized at $1.4 billion.

The United States Steel Corporation, usually known as U.S. Morgan, the country’s most powerful banker, merged Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel Corporation with nine other steel companies to form the world’s largest corporation. Henry George Lesson to highlight the impact businessmen like Carnegie had on industry and philanthropy in the Gilded Age.Įarly in 1901, J. Use this Narrative with the Were the Titans of the Gilded Age “Robber Barons” or “Entrepreneurial Industrialists”? Point-Counterpoint and the Debating Industrial Progress: Andrew Carnegie vs.

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