Meet Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie is considered one of the world's greatest philanthropists and also one of the wealthiest men who ever lived.

Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland on November 25, 1835. His father was a skilled weaver, but advances in mechanical looms were limiting the amount of work he could find and the family was becoming very poor. To escape poverty, his family emigrated to the United States when Andrew was thirteen years old. They settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. At the age of thirteen, Andrew got a job as a bobbin boy for $1.20 per week. After a year, he became a messenger for a local telegraph company. He eventually taught himself how to use the telegraph equipment to send and receive messages and was hired by the superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a private secretary and personal telegrapher. While he was employed by the Telegraph Office, he caught the eye of Thomas A. Scott, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who subsequently offered him a job. Scott also initiated Carnegie's first investment, alerting him to the sale of ten shares in the Adams Express Company. By mortgaging their house his mother, lent him $500 to buy the shares and the first stream of dividends came rolling in his direction. Andrew's story from then on is one of increased business success and power.

While associated with the Pennsylvania Railroad, he developed a wide variety of other business interests. Theodore Woodruff of the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company approached Carnegie with his idea for sleeping cars on the railways and offered him an interest in the project. Carnegie had to secure a bank loan to accept Woodruff's proposal, but it was a decision he would not regret. He ultimately bought the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company and introduced the first successful sleeping car on an American railroad. By the time he was thirty, Carnegie's business interests included iron works, steamers on the Great Lakes, railroads and oil wells. He was subsequently involved with steel production building up Carnegie Steel Corporation, the largest steel manufacturing company in the world, which made him one of the wealthiest men at that time. He eventually sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan, a New York banker, for $480 million in 1901. From this time on he devoted himself to various philanthropic projects.

Carnegie made millions of dollars during his successful business career. The beliefs that made him leave the business world to become a philanthropist are outlined in a famous essay he wrote in 1889 called "The Gospel of Wealth." In this essay, he wrote that wealthy men should live without extravagance, provide moderately for their families, and consider the rest of their wealth as extra money that they should distribute to promote the welfare and happiness of other people. "The Gospel of Wealth" was read all over the world and Carnegie's intentions were praised. Very wealthy people of that period lived lavishly and spent huge amounts of money on their own personal needs and wishes, but Andrew Carnegie was not one of them. In his lifetime he gave away more than $350 million or almost 90 percent of his fortune for what he considered to be the improvement of all mankind.

In 1886 he had married Louise Whitfield, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in New York. She was very supportive of his philanthopic goals and had declared when they got married to devote the bulk of his wealth to the public good. They had one child, Margaret, in 1897. Carnegie died on August 11, 1919, in Shadowbrook, Massachusetts at the age of 83, as a result of bronchial pneumonia.