The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie, 1920
How did a boy who started on a dollar twenty a week build a steel empire? Andrew Carnegie tells his life story himself: the telegraph and the railway, bridges and steel, the millions he later gave away. You will learn his rules about money, quality and people, and see where they cracked.
Who it is for
For those who are starting their own business or growing inside someone else's, and for everyone curious how the son of an unemployed weaver became America's biggest steelmaker and why he gave his fortune away.
Man needs an idol. Amassing wealth is one of the worst forms of idolatry: no idol is more degrading than the worship of money.
A weaver left without work
The Scottish town of Dunfermline, in the 1840s. Young Andrew's father weaves patterned linen on hand looms at home, but steam mills have come to town and orders keep shrinking. One day his father carries the last piece of cloth to a big manufacturer, while his mother waits anxiously for him to return: will there be a new order, or weeks without work ahead? The boy never forgot that his honest father had to ask permission to work, and he decided then that when he grew up, he would put that right.
In 1848 the family sold the looms and, with twenty pounds borrowed, sailed to America, to Pittsburgh. Twelve-year-old Andrew went to work in a cotton mill, changing bobbins of yarn for a dollar and twenty cents a week. He would later earn millions, but, in his own words, none of them brought him as much happiness as that first wage: he was no longer a burden on his parents.
Some decades later this boy became America's biggest steelmaker, sold his business to the banker Morgan and gave away almost the whole fortune. Andrew Carnegie wrote his story for his family and dropped it when war broke out in August 1914. The book came out in 1920, after his death. It is one man's account of himself, and not always an impartial one.
You will follow him from messenger boy to owner of the works and learn the rules he used to explain his success: learn before you are asked, do not play the stock market, put quality above price, surround yourself with people cleverer than you. And at the end you will see what he considered a rich man's duty, and why one strike stayed a wound for the rest of his life.
The street learned by heart
In 1850 fourteen-year-old Carnegie became a messenger at the Pittsburgh telegraph office for two and a half dollars a week. When the job was offered, he did not ask for time to think. He said he could start right away. While you hesitate, he later advised young people, someone else will be called to the job.
Above all he feared he would not learn the office addresses in time. So he memorised the signs along one side of the street and then the other, and at night he recited them in order with his eyes closed. Then he learned the faces of the owners too, so he could hand over a telegram right there on the street.
In the mornings the boys swept the operating room before the telegraphers arrived, and Carnegie spent those minutes on the telegraph key. Once Philadelphia kept calling Pittsburgh insistently, and he dared to answer: he asked them to send slowly, and took an urgent telegram announcing a death. Then Carnegie learned to receive messages by ear, without a paper tape, which few people could do then, and at sixteen he became a telegraph operator. He borrowed books from Colonel Anderson, who had opened his library for working boys. A library, Carnegie said, gives you nothing for free: you have to gain the knowledge yourself.
His real test came when he served as assistant to Thomas Scott on the railway. The line was single track, and only the superintendent could send train orders by telegraph. One morning, after an accident, all the trains stood on sidings and Scott was nowhere to be found. Carnegie, who had often passed on Scott's orders, sent them himself, in Scott's name, and did not leave the instrument until the traffic was moving again. Scott checked everything silently and said nothing, and soon Carnegie was almost always the one who gave the train orders.
Carnegie's conclusion is simple: do something beyond your duties that your seniors will notice. But courage has a reverse side. Once he dropped a packet of the payroll from a locomotive, and it was found right at the water's edge. From then on Carnegie never judged a young man harshly for one big mistake, because chance had saved him too.
About the author
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was born in Scotland, moved with his family to Pittsburgh in 1848, and rose from factory boy to head of the largest steel company in the United States. He sold it in 1901 and spent the rest of his life on philanthropy. His memoirs were published after his death, in 1920.
All books by this author: Andrew Carnegie
Terms from the book
- Morgan
- Anderson
- Scott
- dividend
- speculation
- Jones
- Edwards
- cost price
- Dunfermline: An old town in Scotland, north of Edinburgh, known for its linen. Carnegie was born here in 1835, and later he gave the town a library and a public park.
- Adams Express: An American company that carried parcels and valuables. Its ten shares were Carnegie's first investment, and they paid him a monthly dividend.
- quotations: The current prices at which shares and other securities are bought and sold on the stock exchange.
- Panic of 1873: A financial crash in the United States that began in September 1873 with the failure of the bank Jay Cooke and Company. Years of slump and many ruined businesses followed.
- suretyship: An obligation to pay someone else's debt if the debtor cannot. The surety signs the debt paper next to the debtor's own signature.
- Keystone: Keystone, the bridge-building company that Carnegie and his partners set up in 1862-1863. The name means the central stone of an arch, and Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State.
- Dubuque: A city in Iowa on the Mississippi River. In 1868 Carnegie's company won a contract here for a railway bridge across the river.
- cast iron: An alloy of iron with a high carbon content, smelted from ore. It casts well into moulds but is brittle and can shatter under a blow.
- blast furnace: A tall furnace in which cast iron is smelted from iron ore, coke and limestone.
- Borntraeger: William Borntraeger, a distant relative of Kloman, who came from Germany. He started as an expediter and became manager of Carnegie's mills and his partner.
- expediter: A worker who handles shipments: prepares the papers, counts the goods and dispatches them.
- Kloman: Andrew Kloman, a German-born mechanic from Pittsburgh and one of Carnegie's first partners in the iron business. He invented several machines but went bankrupt after investing secretly, without his partners' knowledge, in another company.
- co-operative store: A shop owned and run by its customers, here the workers of the plant. Carnegie's firm paid the rent on the building.
- sliding scale: A pay system under which workers' earnings rise and fall with the price of the product, but never drop below an agreed minimum. Carnegie introduced it at his rail mill in 1889.
- Homestead: A town near Pittsburgh and Carnegie's steel works there. The 1892 strike at that works ended in bloodshed and became one of the best-known labour conflicts in US history.
- roller: A worker who runs the rolls: passes hot metal between turning rollers to shape it.
- Pinkerton: The Pinkerton private detective agency in the United States. Its armed men were hired to guard plants during strikes.
- van Dyke: John van Dyke, an American professor and a friend of Carnegie's, who prepared his memoirs for print and added his own notes.
- Gospel of Wealth: The name given to Carnegie's articles from 1886 to 1899 on the idea that a rich man should wisely give away his surplus for the common good during his lifetime.
- Hero Fund: A fund Carnegie set up in 1904 with five million dollars of capital. It helps people hurt while saving others, and the families of those who died. Later such funds appeared in Britain and several countries of Europe.
All terms
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