Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American businessman and major philanthropist. He made a vast contrubution to the steel making world during the time of industrilizim. Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive integrated iron and steel operations ever owned by an individual in the United States. His great innovation was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel rails for railroad lines. Carnegie's empire would later embrace the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill, the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for the landmark Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri, an important proof-of-concept for steel technology and the opening of a new steel market. In the late 1880s Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig-iron, steel-rails and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig-metal a day. In 1888 he bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a railway 425 miles long, and a line of lake steamships. An agglutination of the assets of him and his associates occurred in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company.

As years went by, the various Carnegie companies represented in this industry prospered to such an extent that in 1901, he sold his steel holdings to a group of New York-based financiers led by J. Pierpont Morgan for $250 million. The buyout, which was negotiated in secret by Charles M. Schwab (no relation to Charles R. Schwab, the brokerage house founder), was the largest such industrial takeover in the United States at the time. The holdings were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation, a trust organized by J.P. Morgan, and Carnegie himself retired from business. He was bought out at a figure equivalent to a capital of approximately $480 billion, which is the largest personal commercial transaction to date. Besides steel, Carnegie's companies were involved in other areas of the railroad industry. His company Pittsburgh Locomotive and Car Works was noted for its building of large steam locomotives at the turn of the 20th century. His associates and partners included Henry Clay Frick and F. T. F. Lovejoy. He also owned 18 English newspapers, which