Andrew Carnegie

366 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Importance of industrial revolution

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie life was a true rags to riches story. He started out as a poor Scottish immigrant whose first job paid $1.20 per week. He worked his way up to being a multimillionaire while he was still in his thirties. Carnegie is not just known for making money, but he mainly known for giving his fortune.

Andrew’s early live in Scotland was dramatically changed by the Industrial Revolution. His father was a textile worker, Who lost his job when the power looms were able to produce cloth cheaper and faster than weavers. His father spoke up for worker’s rights, but poor workers weren’t allowed to vote. Carnegie’s mother was the realist who sold their belongings so they can immigrate to America.

In America even on unskilled twelve-year-old could get a job as a bobbin boy like Andrew. Andrew was always interested in making more money, so he moved to a messenger boy where he taught himself Morse code from watching the telegraph operators. His big break came when he found a check for $500. He then turned it into the proper authorities and was written up in the Pittsburgh Gazette. Thomas A. Scott, after reading the article about “honest little fellow”, hired Carnegie as a assistant railroad man at 35 dollars a month.

Working for Scott, Andrew learned how to put money to work, he invested in railroads , bridges , and oil derives. Carnegie remembered his fathers idealism and he wrote himself a note to work only two more years and then help others. The lure of money made him forget about the note for quite sometime.

Carnigie entered the steel bussiness and became the king of Americas steel industry. The Carngie steel company was very profitable. He used the most efficent machinery and kept wages extremely low. Then workers went on a strike because the wages were futher reduced, Pinkertinon dectectives (men with gun) were sent in and killed 20 strikers. Andrew Carngie was vactioning in Scottland at the time. What a scondral!!

Nine years later Carngie would begin to honor his fathers idealism. J. Pierpont Morgan, a powerful banker, bought Carngie out. Carngie was now one of the richest men in the world and started a new career.

Show More
Related

  • Cornelius Vanderbilt: Captain Of Industry

    279 Words  | 1 Pages

    Cornelius Vanderbilt was a captain of industry. He came from a poor family and turned into a captain of industry controlling 85% of rail road and inspiring others to follow suit. He did many great things and not so great. Went from making a steamboat ferry to Grand Central Station. By the end of his life he had more than $100 million dollars.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Alger's 'Ragged Dick'

    891 Words  | 2 Pages

    Nineteenth century industrialism presented the United States with a unique and unprecedented set of problems, as illustrated through the works of Rebecca Harding Davis and Horatio Alger Jr. Although both authors felt compelled to address these problems in their writing, Rebecca Harding Davis’s grasp on the realities faced by the working poor and women was clearly stronger than Alger’s. Not only did Alger possess a naïve view on exactly how much control an individual has over their own circumstances, but he failed to address the struggles of women entirely. As a result, Alger conceived a rather romantic world where the old-fashioned American ideals of hard work, determination, and self-sacrifice enable a young boy to lift himself from poverty.

    Read More

  • Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller

    629 Words  | 2 Pages

    Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller: Captains of industry, or robber barons? True, Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller may have been the most influential businessmen of the 19th century, but was the way they conducted business proper? To fully answer this question, we must look at the following: First understand how Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller changed the market of their industries. Second, look at the similarities and differences in how both men achieved dominance.

    Read More

  • Essay On The Difference Between Carnegie And Gompers

    575 Words  | 2 Pages

    Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers had very similar ideas during the Industrial Revolution. Both authors wrote articles directed towards the wealthy in hopes of making a difference by explaining how the rich mocked and refused to share money with the poor. Although Carnegie and Gompers’s writings were aimed towards the wealthy for different reasons, both made an enormous contribution to how the wealthy should treat their workers and

    Read More

  • How Did Andrew Carnegie Affect The Economy

    599 Words  | 2 Pages

    Over the years Carnegie became tired of being in the steel business, so when J.P Morgan and his partners were interested in Carnegie’s Steel Company, Carnegie found that way would be a great way to get out of that world. Carnegie sold his company to them left them to $480,000,000, that was the second smart move for him. In 1901 Carnegie became the richest man alive, and he knew he had to give it away when he died.

    Read More

  • The Effects of the American Industrial Revolution Described in "A People’s History of the United States", "America: A Narrative History" and "A Histor

    1169 Words  | 3 Pages

    He described how women were forced to work in shops and factories instead of focusing on how the United States helped people to earn more money. He tells the history of the industrial revolution in a dark but true way. An example of that is the way he tells how angry the Irish immigrants were because of the racism in 1849. “The anger of the city poor often expressed itself in futile violence over nationality or religion. The crowd, shouting ‘Burn the damn den of aristocracy,’ charged, throwing bricks” (227).

    Read More

  • Andrew Carnegie On The Gospel Of Wealth

    1210 Words  | 3 Pages

    Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1835. His father, Will, was a weaver and a follower of Chartism, a popular movement of the British working class that called for the masses to vote and to run for Parliament in order to help improve conditions for workers. The exposure to such political beliefs and his family's poverty made a lasting impression on young Andrew and played a significant role in his life after his family immigrated to the United States in 1848. Andrew Carnegie amassed wealth in the steel industry after immigrating from Scotland as a boy. He came from a poor family and had little formal education.

    Read More

  • Andrew Carnegie: A Hero Or A Hero?

    796 Words  | 2 Pages

    Andrew Carnegie, a philanthropist who has helped hundreds. But there is a side of him that not many knew. Is Andrew Carnegie a hero? Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. He and his family were in poverty, living in an attic of a weavers cottage. For a better life, his family moved to America. There Carnegie started working as a bobbin boy. Carnegie later became locally famous, and was later given a well paying job. Andrew Carnegie was not a hero because he was greedy, and prideful. In the Andrew Carnegie,“Wealth” North American Review, June 1889 text it states that Carnegie did not leave much fortune to his own family, because he believed it to be “misguided affection” This was selfish of him to give his own family enough money, the money that they deserve. In addition in the Cartoon Published in The Saturday Globe it shows that while Andrew Carnegie was giving money to other countries, his workers needed the money the most to be able to support their families.

    Read More

  • Was Andrew Carnegie A Hero Or Anti Hero?

    694 Words  | 2 Pages

    To understand Carnegie before he became a wealthy man, he grew up poor working for $1.20 a week (Document LV). At the age of 50 years, he took a risk by investing in a package delivery company. His gamble paid off and he gained money to start his company, Carnegie’s Steel Company. Eventually, his company grew and caused

    Read More

  • Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business

    626 Words  | 2 Pages

    The biography begins when the impoverished Carnegie family leaves their home in Scotland having been replaced by machines in the Industrial Revolution. People started sailing to America because their “old home no longer promised anything at all” (Livesay 14). They end up earning twice as much as they did in Scotland with their son Tom in school, the parents Margaret and Will shoe-binding, and Andrew working as a bobbin boy. Money earned without work was an opening to corruption in the eyes of a Republican nation and it was also assumed that hereditary wealth had caused the decline of Europe (Lena). Carnegie soon rises from poor bobbin boy to railroad superintendent, all the way to manager at the Pennsylvania Railroad. "I have made millions since, Carnegie later claimed, but none of these gave me so much happiness as my first week's earnings. I was now a helper of the family, a bread winner” (16). The background exposition on his family became crucial to understanding Carnegie’s drive to succeed. Livesay also fluently demonstrates the various professional relationships Carnegie develops throughout his life and how they affect his career. When his first investment pays a profit of $10, Carnegie discovers a whole new world of earning money from the capital. In 1865, he establishes his own business enterprises and...

    Read More

  • Industrial Expansion and Governmental Reform: The Gilded Age

    519 Words  | 2 Pages

    The last entrepreneur is J. Pierpont Morgan, and unlike Rockefeller and Carnegie he was born into a wealthy family. After attending school in various places in Europe, Morgan was then relocated to New York to represent his father. Morgan as an investment banker bought corporate stocks and bonds and sold them to make a financial gain. Like his preceding entrepreneurs, Morgan was ambitious and wanted to dominate the industry, he realized that the railroads were a key factor into his success. After gaining control over some railroads, Morgan eventually acquired much of the US’s

    Read More

  • A Brief Biography of Andrew Carnegie

    863 Words  | 2 Pages

    There have been many wealthy men Throughout American history, many have been the topic of many heated debates among them, Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie at one time was the richest man in the world, who immediately after gaining that title began giving his money away. The impact and size of Carnegie’s philanthropic efforts are undeniable, but why he gave so much has been a topic of debate for nearly a century now. Carnegie’s rags to riches story is the epitome of the American dream and has been an inspiration to many entrepreneurs around the world.

    Read More

  • The Capitalists Who Shaped Post-Civil War America

    972 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the 1800’s, business leaders who built their affluence by stealing and bribing public officials to propose laws in their favor were known as “robber barons”. J.P. Morgan, a banker, financed the restructuring of railroads, insurance companies, and banks. In addition, Andrew Carnegie, the steel king, disliked monopolistic trusts. Nonetheless, ruthlessly destroying the businesses and lives of many people merely for personal profit; Carnegie attained a level of dominance and wealth never before seen in American history, but was only able to obtain this through acts that were dishonest and oftentimes, illicit. Document D resentfully emphasizes the alleged capacity of the corrupt industrialists. In the picture illustrated, panic-stricken people pay acknowledgment to the lordly tycoons. Correlating to this political cartoon, in 1900, Carnegie was willing to sell his holdings of his company. During the time Morgan was manufacturing

    Read More

  • The Taint of Money in “Life in the Iron Mills”

    1644 Words  | 4 Pages

    Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.

    Read More

  • Andrew Carnegie and His American Dream

    380 Words  | 1 Pages

    Carnegie's first job was a telegraph messenger boy, and later upgraded to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as a telegraph operator. His persevering work allowed him to quickly advance through the company, and he became the superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division. He continued making investments and made good profits throughout the civil war, and finally left Pennsylvania Railroad and started his own iron companies, eventually Keystone Bridge Works and Union Ironworks.

    Read More

More about Andrew Carnegie

Open Document