Andrew Carnegie, (born November 25, 1835, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland—died August 11, 1919, Lenox, Massachusetts, U.S.), Scottish-born American industrialist who led the big enlargement of the American metal business within the late nineteenth century. He was additionally one of the vital necessary philanthropists of his period.
Carnegie’s father, William Carnegie, a handloom weaver, was a Chartist and marcher for workingman’s causes; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Morrision, additionally an agitator, had been a good friend of William Cobbett. During the younger Carnegie’s childhood the arrival of the facility loom in Dunfermline and a basic financial downturn impoverished his father, inducing the Carnegies to immigrate in 1848 to the United States, the place they joined a Scottish colony of family members and buddies in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now a part of Pittsburgh). Young Andrew started work at age 12 as a bobbin boy in a cotton manufacturing unit. He shortly grew to become enthusiastically Americanized, educating himself by studying and writing and attending night time faculty.
At age 14 Carnegie grew to become a messenger in a telegraph workplace, the place he ultimately caught the discover of Thomas Scott, a superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, who made Carnegie his personal secretary and private telegrapher in 1853. Carnegie’s subsequent rise was fast, and in 1859 he succeeded Scott as superintendent of the railroad’s Pittsburgh division. While on this submit he invested within the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company (the unique holder of the Pullman patents) and launched the primary profitable sleeping automobile on American railroads. He had in the meantime begun making shrewd investments in such industrial issues because the Keystone Bridge Company, the Superior Rail Mill and Blast Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, and the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works. He additionally profitably invested in a Pennsylvania oilfield, and he took a number of journeys to Europe, promoting railroad securities. By the age of 30 he had an annual earnings of $50,000.
During his journeys to Britain he got here to fulfill steelmakers. Foreseeing the long run demand for iron and metal, Carnegie left the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 and began managing the Keystone Bridge Company. From about 1872–73, at about age 38, he started concentrating on metal, founding close to Pittsburgh the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which might ultimately evolve into the Carnegie Steel Company. In the 1870s Carnegie’s new firm constructed the primary metal crops within the United States to make use of the brand new Bessemer steelmaking course of, borrowed from Britain. Other improvements adopted, together with detailed cost- and production-accounting procedures that enabled the corporate to realize larger efficiencies than every other manufacturing business of the time. Any technological innovation that might cut back the price of making metal was speedily adopted, and within the Nineties Carnegie’s mills launched the essential open-hearth furnace into American steelmaking. Carnegie additionally obtained larger effectivity by buying the coke fields and iron-ore deposits that furnished the uncooked supplies for steelmaking, in addition to the ships and railroads that transported these provides to his mills. The vertical integration thus achieved was one other milestone in American manufacturing. Carnegie additionally recruited extraordinarily succesful subordinates to work for him, together with the administrator Henry Clay Frick, the steelmaster and inventor Captain Bill Jones, and his personal brother Thomas M. Carnegie.
In 1889 Carnegie’s huge holdings have been consolidated into the Carnegie Steel Company, a restricted partnership that henceforth dominated the American metal business. In 1890 the American metal business’s output surpassed that of Great Britain’s for the primary time, largely owing to Carnegie’s successes. The Carnegie Steel Company continued to prosper even in the course of the despair of 1892, which was marked by the bloody Homestead strike. (Although Carnegie professed help for the rights of unions, his objectives of economic system and effectivity might have made him favour native administration on the Homestead plant, which used Pinkerton guards to attempt to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers.)
In 1900 the income of Carnegie Steel (which grew to become an organization) have been $40,000,000, of which Carnegie’s share was $25,000,000. Carnegie offered his firm to J.P. Morgan’s newly shaped United States Steel Corporation for $480,000,000 in 1901. He subsequently retired and devoted himself to his philanthropic actions, which have been themselves huge.
Carnegie wrote continuously about political and social issues, and his most well-known article, “Wealth,” showing within the June 1889 subject of the North American Review, outlined what got here to be referred to as the Gospel of Wealth. This doctrine held {that a} man who accumulates nice wealth has an obligation to make use of his surplus wealth for “the improvement of mankind” in philanthropic causes. A “man who dies rich dies disgraced.”
Carnegie’s personal distributions of wealth got here to complete about $350,000,000, of which $62,000,000 went for benefactions within the British Empire and $288,000,000 for benefactions within the United States. His fundamental “trusts,” or charitable foundations, have been (1) the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (Edinburgh), based in 1901 and supposed for the advance and enlargement of the 4 Scottish universities and for Scottish pupil monetary help, (2) the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, based in 1903 and supposed to assist Dunfermline’s academic establishments, (3) the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust (Dunfermline), based in 1913 and supposed for numerous charitable functions, together with the constructing of libraries, theatres, child-welfare centres, and so forth, (4) the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, based in 1896 and supposed to enhance Pittsburgh’s cultural and academic establishments, (5) the Carnegie Institution of Washington, based in 1902 and contributing to numerous areas of scientific analysis, (6) the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, based in 1910 and supposed to disseminate (normally via publications) info to advertise peace and understanding amongst nations, (7) the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the biggest of all Carnegie foundations, based in 1911 and supposed for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States” and, from 1917, Canada and the British colonies. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has aided faculties and universities and libraries, in addition to analysis and coaching in legislation, economics, and drugs.
Chief amongst Carnegie’s writings are Triumphant Democracy (1886; rev. ed. 1893), The Gospel of Wealth, a group of essays (1900), The Empire of Business (1902), Problems of To-day (1908), and Autobiography (1920).
Carnegie married Louise Whitfield in 1887. Until World War I, the Carnegies alternated between Skibo Castle in northern Scotland, their residence in New York City, and their summer season home “Shadowbrook” in Lenox, Massachusetts.