Andrew Carnegie

About this figure

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist who built one of the largest steel enterprises in the world and then gave away the bulk of his fortune, becoming one of history's most consequential philanthropists. Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, to a family of modest means, Carnegie emigrated with his parents to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1848, where he began working as a young teenager before moving through a series of jobs with the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he learned the fundamentals of large-scale industrial organization and investment. He entered the iron and steel business in the 1870s, and by adopting new production technologies and aggressively integrating suppliers and distribution within a single company, built the Carnegie Steel Company into the dominant steel producer in the United States. In 1901, he sold the company to the financier J. P. Morgan for a sum widely reported at roughly 480 million dollars, a transaction that formed the core of the newly created United States Steel Corporation, then the largest business enterprise in the world.

Carnegie spent much of the rest of his life directing his fortune toward philanthropic causes, funding more than 2,500 public libraries across the English-speaking world along with institutions including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and what became Carnegie Mellon University. His philosophy of wealth was set out most fully in his 1889 essay "Wealth," later widely reprinted as "The Gospel of Wealth," in which he argued that individuals who accumulated great fortunes had a moral obligation to distribute that wealth for public benefit during their own lifetimes, through the endowment of institutions that would help others help themselves, rather than passing it on to heirs or leaving it to be dispersed after death. His "Autobiography," left unfinished at his death and published posthumously in 1920, traces his rise from an immigrant weaver's son to industrial magnate and reflects at length on the business decisions and personal relationships, including his long partnership and eventual rupture with his plant manager Henry Clay Frick, that shaped his career.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.