Andrew Carnegie

HE MADE MORE MILLIONAIRES THAN ANY MAN WHO EVER LIVED
 
Andrew Carnegie was born without benefit of doctor oi midwife because his people were too poor to afford either. He started working for two cents an hour — and he made four hundred million dollars.

Once I visited the cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, where he was born. The house had only two rooms. His father ran a weaving business on the ground floor and the family cooked and ate and slept in one tiny, dark attic room upstairs.
 
When the Carnegie family came to America, Andrew’s father made tablecloths and peddled them from door to door. His mother took in washing and stitched boots for a shoemaker. Andrew had only one shirt, so his mother washed and ironed that shirt every night after he had gone to bed. She worked for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and Andrew adored her. When he was twenty-two, he promised her that he would never marry as long as she lived. And he didn’t. He didn’t marry until his mother died thirty years later. He was fifty-two when he married and sixty-two when his first and only child was born.
 
As a boy, he said to his mother over and over: "Mother, I am going to be rich some day so that you can have silk dresses and servants and a carriage of your own.” He often said that he inherited all his brains from his mother, that his undying love for her was one of the driving forces of his spectacular career. When she died, his grief was so in¬ tense that he couldn’t bear to speak her name for fifteen years. He once paid the mortgage on an old woman’s house in Scotland merely because she looked like his mother.
 
Andrew Carnegie was known as the steel king; yet he knew very little about the manufacture of steel. He had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men working for him who knew more about steel than he did. But he knew how to handle men — and that is what made him rich. Early in life, he showed a flare for organization, for leadership, for making other people work for him.
 
When he was a boy in Scotland, he got hold of a mother rabbit. Presto! He soon had a whole nest of little rabbits — and nothing to feed them. But he had a brilliant idea. He told the boys in the neighborhood that if they would go out and pull enough clover and dandelions to feed the rabbits, he would name the bunnies in their honor. The plan worked like magic.
 
Years later, Carnegie used the same psychology in business. For example, he wanted to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Mr. J. Edgar Thomson was the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad at that time. So Andrew Carnegie built a huge steel mill in Pittsburgh and called it the "J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works.” Naturally, Mr. Thomson was delighted, and it didn’t take much persuasion to get him to order his steel rails from the company that bore his name.
 
Carnegie got a job as a telegraph messenger boy in Pittsburgh. The pay was fifty cents a day. It seemed like a fortune. He was a stranger in town. He was afraid he might lose his position, because he didn’t know how to get about, so he memorized the names and addresses of every firm in the business section of the city. He longed to be an operator; so he studied telegraphy at night and rushed down to the office early each morning to practice on the keys.
 
One morning the wire was hot with big news. Philadelphia was calling Pittsburgh, calling frantically. There was no operator on duty. So Andrew Carnegie rushed to the wire, took the message, delivered it, and was immediately promoted to the position of operator with his salary doubled.
 
His restless energy, his sleepless ambition attracted attention. The Pennsylvania railroad erected a telegraph line of its own. Andrew Carnegie was made operator, then private secretary to the division superintendent.
 
Suddenly one day an event happened that started him on the way to fortune. An inventor came and sat down beside him in a railroad train and showed him the model of a new sleeping car he had invented. The sleeping cars of that day were crude bunks nailed to the sides of freight cars. This new invention was much like the Pullman car of today. Carnegie had shrewd Scotch foresight. He saw that the invention had possibilities — enormous possibilities. So he borrowed money and bought stock in the concern. The company paid sensational dividends and when Andrew Carnegie reached twenty-five, his annual income from this one investment alone was five thousand dollars a year.
 
Once a wooden bridge burned on the railroad and tied up traffic for days. Andrew Carnegie was a division superintendent at the time. Wooden bridges were doomed. He saw that. Iron was the coming thing. So he borrowed money, formed a company, started building iron bridges — and the profits poured in so fast that he was almost dizzy.
 
This son of a weaver had the golden touch. He rode high, wide and handsome. Luck was with him, phenomenal luck. He and some friends bought a farm amidst the oil fields of Western Pennsylvania for forty thousand dollars and made a million dollars out of it in one year. By the time this canny Scot had reached twenty-seven, he had an income of a thousand dollars a week — and fifteen years before he had been working for twenty cents a day.
 
It was 1862 now. Abe Lincoln was in the White House. The Civil War was raging. Prices were skyrocketing. Big things were happening. Frontiers were being pushed back. The far West was opening up. Railroads were soon to be thrown across the continent. Cities were to be built. America trembled on the threshold of an astonishing era.
 
And Andy Carnegie, with the smoke and flames belching from his steel furnaces, rode up on a tidal wave of prosperity — rode and kept on riding until he had acquired riches such as had never been dreamed of before in the history of mankind.
 
Yet he never worked very hard. He played about half of the time. He said that he surrounded himself with assistants who knew more than he did — and he spurred them on to pile up millions for him. He was Scotch, but he wasn’t too Scotch. He let his partners share in his profits and he made more millionaires than any other man who has ever lived.
 
He went to school only four years in his life; but in spite of that he wrote eight books of travel, biography, essays and economics and gave away sixty million dollars to public libraries, and seventy-eight millions for the advancement of education.
 
He memorized all the poems that Bobbie Burns ever wrote; and he could repeat from memory all of Macbeth, all of Hamlet, all of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and all of The Merchant of Venice.
 
He was not a member of any church, but he gave away more than seven thousand pipe organs to churches.
 
He gave away three hundred and sixty-five million dollars. That means he gave away a million dollars for every day in the year. Newspapers ran contests and offered prizes to those who could best tell him how to give away his hoard of gold. For he declared it was a disgrace to die rich.