by Andre Sanchez

Andrew Carnegie came to America from Scotland with his parents in 1848.  Born in Dunfermline on 25 November 1835, his first job was in a cotton mill threading bobbins, then he found a job as a telegraph messenger with Western Union.  He was soon promoted to telegraph operator before joining the Pennsylvania Railroad company in 1853. 

He invested his earnings from the railroad company, including very shrewd investments in oil, and made some very substantial profits.  In 1865 he eventually left the railroad company and devoted his efforts to his iron companies including the Freedom Iron Company and the Keystone Bridge Company.  He formed the Carnegie Steel Company in 1899, and the rest is history.  However, that history is worth relating.

In 1861, at the age of 26, he started up the Freedom Iron Company, and used the new Bessemer process for making steel, patented in 1855, and in 1875, after a visit to England to visit some of Bessemer’s steel works he opened his own steel plant, the Edgar Wallace Steel Works using the proceeds of some shrewd investments. The idea for the Keystone Bridge Company was developed when he was working with the railroad. He recognized the importance of bridges, especially iron bridges, to the developing railway system, and decided to invest some of his investment earnings not only in iron, but also in bridge building.

He therefore became involved in both the raw material and a major end use for that material. It is this kind of foresight that Andrew Carnegie was famous for, and that eventually led to him becoming one of the richest men in the world. His money was made through astute reasoning and a knack of making money through hard work, investment and an eye for what large companies were prepared to pay for.

He wrote in his Gospel of Wealth in 1889 that any money that an individual owned beyond that required to look after himself and his family should be used for the benefit of the community in the form of a trust fund.  And he was true to his own words.  He formed all of his companies into the Carnegie Steel Company in 1899, the biggest steel company in the world, and sold it in 1901 to financier J.P. Morgan for $480 million, who eventually founded the United States Steel Corporation.

Andrew Carnegie then came true to his words of the Gospel of Wealth.  He started by making a series of personal gifts to those he believe needed them, including several grants to his home town, and then set up a number of trusts. In March 1901, he provided $5.1 million to New York City for the founding of a number of libraries that would be open and free to the public.  Over the next hundred years, this trust would provide libraries to communities all over the world.

His philanthropic activities were not restricted to libraries, however, and the Carnegie Trust provides funds world wide, including in his native Scotland, for scholarships for less fortunate children to attend university, and many others for democracy, rural development, young people initiatives, and creative philanthropy, to name but a few of over twenty trusts.

For some early entrepreneurs their opportunities lay in what the public wanted, but for Andrew Carnegie it was a few steps up from that:  his lay in what corporations wanted, and were willing to pay top dollar for.  The best iron, and when it was invented, steel. These were the materials of the future, and on which the railroad and construction industries depended.  Whoever controlled the iron and steel manufacturing plants also controlled vast sums of money.  This, in his day, is what Andrew Carnegie did, and he did it well.

He lived a life that was based on humanity and integrity, and lived what he preached.  He came from a humble beginning, being born in a small house in Dunfermline, Scotland, where people, slept where they washed and ate.  A bygone era, thank goodness, for most of us reading this, but he did not forget his humble beginnings.

Were he alive today he would be working in Africa an in every other part of the world where the people needed help. If he were alive now he would have bought out Bill Gates and he would have given Microsoft free to the world if he believed that to be the answer to their problems.

At around 5 ft 5 inches, he was a small man in very large shoes. There has been none like him since, and his memory will rightly live on in his Carnegie Trusts that still provide help to those that need it, and also in his libraries that provide free books to those that want them and can benefit from them.

A Short Biography of Andrew Carnegie was originally published at http://www.businessmannow.com