CARNEGIE, Andrew, American ironmaster, manufacturer and philanthropist: b. Dunfermline, Scotland, 25 Nov. 1835. None even of the mighty makers of their own fortunes began closer to absolute zero; certainly none who have owed success not to fortunate speculations, but to steady labor, sagacity and self-culture, the natural working of the highest powers on opportunities open to all and less to him than to most. His father owned a small hand-loom business, which was closed in 1848 by the competition of steam. He then emigrated to the United States and settled in Allegheny City, Pa. The 10-year-old child here became a bobbin-boy at 20 cents a day; his alertness in a few months brought him transference to an engine-room, his penmanship and arithmetic a chance to do clerical work. Next a telegraph messenger boy at Pittsburgh (with a mother and younger brother to support from his slender wages), he promptly mastered telegraphy, was soon given a place as operator, and won himself extra earnings and experience in composition as a newspaper telegraph reporter. Superior fitness brought him the post of telegraphic train dispatcher to the
Railroad; then of secretary to its general
superintendent, Colonel Scott; and in 1860, when his chief became vice-president, Mr. Carnegie was made superintendent of the Western Division. Meantime his business fortune had opened with the tentative adoption by the road, through his agency, of the Woodruff sleeping-car system, in which he shrewdly embarked some borrowed money; his expert knowledge made it investment, not speculation; and his dividends went partially into oil lands around Oil City, selected with equal judgment. At the outbreak of the war, Colonel Scott was made Assistant Secretary of War, and gave Mr. Carnegie charge of the eastern military railroads and telegraph lines, and of this department there was no complaint or scandal, and no breakdown except of Mr. Carnegie's health from overwork. He was also the third man wounded on the Union side, while removing obstructions from the Washington tracks.
Already a small capitalist, in 1862 the
Pennsylvania road's experiments in replacing wooden
with iron bridges led him to forecast the future
monopoly of the latter, and organize the
Keystone Bridge Works, which built the first iron
bridge across the Ohio. To increase their
profit by furnishing their own iron, he entered
the field which has made him one of the industrial
sovereigns of all time. The first step was
the erection of the Union Iron Mills, furnaces
and rolling mills; the last, after inspection of
the Bessemer process in England, to establish it
in this country in 1868. The story since is one
of swift aggregation of plant to plant, till they
have dominated their class, and become one of
the chief industrial factors of the entire business
world in this its greatest age. By 1888 he
had acquired a controlling interest in his foremost
rival, the Homestead Steel Works, and in
seven other immense establishments centred
around Pittsburgh; in 1899 he consolidated all
these into one giant structure, the Carnegie
Steel Company; and in 1901 he retired from
business life, transferring his company at a
valuation of $500,000,000 to be merged into one
still vaster, the United States Steel Corporation, formed by J. Pierpont Morgan. His United States residence is in New York; his summer establishment at Skibo Castle, in the extreme north of Scotland.
Such supreme success, fairly won in a struggle
with the world, is of course the result of a
supreme individual genius not to be taught or
explained, but as the amount of work any one
man can do unassisted is a trifle, the chief
instrumentality is always the faculty of
organization. Mr. Carnegie himself once said that
the organization was the business; that if
stripped at a blow of all his material property
and business connections, but left his organization, in four years he would have re-established himself. But the organization is simply the men who work it, with their capacity of selecting capable subordinates, and understanding public needs and the means of supplying them; and this leaves the faculty of creating and sustaining it no nearer solution than before. In the last analysis it means a nicely accurate judgment of men, resulting from an intuitive gift informed and tested by long experience; and as men are not pawns, it implies the power of persuading them into and keeping them in alliance as well.