Carnegie gave away a fortune after forging steel America
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), born in a Dunfermline weaver's cottage, reached Pittsburgh at twelve in 1848 and went on to lead America's steel boom. In his last eighteen years he gave away about $350 million, nearly 90 percent of his fortune, above all to libraries, education and the cause of world peace.
His father was a handloom weaver whose trade collapsed; his mother kept the family going by selling potted meats, and a loan from her brother George Lauder, who had taught young Andrew about Robert Burns and William Wallace, paid for the move to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Andrew's first job was bobbin boy in a cotton mill, 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $1.20. He next tended a boiler for $2 a week, then became a telegraph messenger in 1849, memorising every Pittsburgh business and learning to read signals by ear. Colonel James Anderson opened his 400-book library to working boys on Saturday nights, and Carnegie vowed that if he grew rich, other poor boys would get the same chance.
Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad hired him in 1853 at $4 a week, and on 1 December 1859 he became superintendent of its Western Division; he hired his cousin Maria Hogan, the country's first female telegraph operator. Scott also opened doors to insider investments. In 1855 Carnegie's mother mortgaged the family's $700 house for $600 so he could put $500 into the Adams Express Company, and sleeping-car shares that Woodruff had passed to Scott and Thomson as a payoff came his way too. In the Civil War he ran Union military railways and telegraphs in the East and rode the locomotive carrying the first brigade into Washington. An 1864 stake in Columbia Oil paid over $1 million in dividends in a year.
After the war he built the Keystone Bridge Works and Union Ironworks, winning contracts through his railroad friends, and supplied steel for the Eads Bridge at St. Louis, finished in 1874, which proved the metal's worth. In 1901 he sold Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan for $303,450,000, the core of U.S. Steel, and passed Rockefeller as America's richest man.
His 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth" urged the rich to improve society and backed progressive and estate taxes. He paid for Carnegie Hall and the Peace Palace in The Hague and founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Hero Fund and what became Carnegie Mellon University.
Source: Andrew Carnegie
