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Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835–August 11, 1919) was an Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist.
Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland into a weaver's family. In 1848 his father, who had been a Chartist, emigrated to America, settling in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Young Carnegie started work at an early age as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, and a few years later was engaged as a telegraph clerk and operator with the Atlantic and Ohio Company. He was noted as one of the first operators to read telegraphic signals by sound. His ability as a worker was noted by T.A. Scott of the Pennsylvania railway, who employed him as a secretary; and in 1859, when Scott became vice-president of the company, he made Carnegie superintendent of the western division of the line. In this post Carnegie was responsible for several improvements in the service; and when the American Civil War opened he accompanied Scott, then Assistant United States Secretary of War, to the front.
While in this position he met also Mr. Woodruff, inventor of the sleeping car. Mr. Carnegie immediately recognized the great merit of the invention, and readily joined in the effort to have it adopted. The first sources of the enormous wealth he subsequently attained were his introduction of sleeping cars for railways, and his purchase in 1864 of Storey Farm on Oil Creek, which cost $40,000, and yielded in one year over $1,000,000 in cash dividends, and where a large profit, generally, was secured from the oil wells. Mr. Carnegie was subsequently associated with others in establishing a rolling mill.
But all this was only a preliminary to the success attending his development of the iron and steel industries at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive and complete system of iron and steel industries ever managed by an individual. His great innovation was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel rails for railroad lines.
Carnegie's empire embraced the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill (Wilson, Walker & County), the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company and the Scotia ore mines. The capacity of these works in the late 1880s approximated 2,000 tons of pig-metal a day, and he was the largest manufacturer of pig-iron, steel-rails and coke in the world. He bought out the rival Homestead Steel works, and by 1888 had under his control an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a railway 425 miles long and a line of lake steamships.
As years went by, the various Carnegie companies represented in this industry prospered to such an extent that in 1901, he sold his steel holdings to a group of New York-based financiers led by J.P. Morgan for $250 million. The buyout, which was negotiated in secret by Charles M. Schwab (no relation to Charles Schwab, the brokerage house founder), was the largest such industrial takeover in the United States at the time. The holdings were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation, a trust organized by J. Pierpont Morgan, and Carnegie himself retired from business, he was bought out at a figure equivalent to a capital of approximately $100 million.
Besides steel, Carnegie's companies were involved in other areas of the railroad industry. His company Pittsburgh Locomotive and Car Works was noted for its building of large locomotives at the turn of the 20th century. Besides directing the great iron industries, he long owned eighteen English newspapers, which he controlled in the interests of radicalism.
From 1901 forward public attention was turned from the shrewd business capacity which had enabled him to accumulate such a fortune to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to utilizing it on philanthropic objects. His views on social subjects, and the responsibilities which great wealth involved, were already known in a book through entitled Triumphant Democracy (1886), and in his Gospel of Wealth (1900). He acquired Skibo Castle, in Sutherlandshire, Scotland, and made his home partly there and partly in New York; and he devoted his life to the work of providing the capital for purposes of public interest, and social and educational advancement.
In all his ideas he was dominated by an intense belief in the future and influence of the English-speaking people, in their democratic government and alliance for the purpose of peace and the abolition of war, and in the progress of education on unsectarian lines. He was a powerful supporter of the movement for spelling reform, as a means of promoting the spread of the English language. Among all his many philanthrophic efforts the provision of public libraries in the United States and United Kingdom (and similarly in other English-speaking countries) was especially prominent, and Carnegie libraries gradually sprang up on all sides, his method being to build and equip, but only on condition that the local authority provided site and maintenance, and thus to secure local interest and responsibility. By the end of 1908 he had distributed over $10 million for founding libraries alone. Early on, in 1885, he gave $500,000 to Pittsburgh for a public library, and in 1886, $250,000 to Allegheny City for a music hall and library, and $250,000 to Edinburgh, Scotland, for a free library. In total Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, sited in nearly every U.S. state (except Alaska, Delaware and Rhode Island), as well as Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Fiji.
He gave $2 million in 1901 to start the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburg, and the same amount in 1902 to found the Carnegie Institution at Washington, D.C., and in both of these, and other, cases he added later to the original endowment. (CIT is now Carnegie Mellon University.)
In Scotland he gave $2 million in 1901 to establish a trust for providing funds for assisting education at the Scottish universities, a benefaction which resulted in his being elected Lord Rector of University of St. Andrews. He was a large benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute under Booker Washington for African-American education. He also established large pension funds in 1901 for his former employes at Homestead, and in 1905 for American college professors. He also funded the construction of 7,000 church organs. Also, long before he sold out, in 1879, he erected commodious swimming-baths for the use of the people of his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland, and in the following year gave $40,000 for the establishment of a free library there. In 1884 he gave $50,000 to Bellevue Hospital Medical College to found a histological laboratory, now called the Carnegie Laboratory.
He owned Carnegie Hall in New York City from its construction in 1890 until his widow sold it in 1924.
Mention must also be made of his founding of Carnegie Hero Fund commissions, in America (1904) and in the United Kingdom (1908), for the recognition of deeds of heroism; his contribution of $500,000 in 1903 for the erection of a Temple of Peace at The Hague, and of $150,000 for a Pan-American Palace in Washington as a home for the International Bureau of American Republics.
In an era in which financial capital was consolidated in New York City, Carnegie famously stayed aloof from the city, preferring to live near his factories in western Pennsylvania and at Skibo Castle, Scotland, which he bought and refurbished. However, he also built and resided in a townhouse on New York City's Fifth Avenue that later came to house the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
Mr Carnegie married in 1887 and had one daughter. His brother, Thomas M. Carnegie, also born in Dunfermline, Scotland, on October 2, 1843; died in Homewood, Pennsylvania, October 19, 1886, was associated with Andrew in his business enterprises.
By the time he died in Lenox, Massachusetts, Carnegie had given away $350,695,653. At his death, the last $30,000,000 was likewise given away to foundations, charities and to pensioners.
He is interred in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York.
Carnegie was a social Darwinist who wrote The Gospel of Wealth, in which he stated his belief that the rich should use their wealth to help enrich society, rather than wasting it on those who do not have wealth.
The following is taken from one of Carnegie's memos to himself:
Carnegie also believed that achievement of financial success could be reduced to a simple formula which could be duplicated by the average person. In 1908, he commissioned Napoleon Hill, then a newspaper reporter, to interview over 500 millionaires to find out the common threads of their success. Hill eventually became his advisor and their work was published in 1928, after Carnegie's death, in Hill's book The Law of Success.
Mr. Carnegie was a frequent contributor to periodicals on labor issues.
In addition to Triumphant Democracy (1886), Gospel of Wealth (1900) and The Law of Success (1928), other publications by him were An American Four-in-hand in Britain (1883), Round the World (1884), The Empire of Business (1902), a Life of James Watt (1905) and Problems of To-day (1908).
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