60 Fun Facts About Andrew Carnegie

Which children's television show, first aired in 1969, was created with grants from Andrew Carnegie's main foundation?

Sesame Street. A Carnegie Corporation executive, Lloyd Morrisett, and producer Joan Ganz Cooney planned a show to ready poor preschoolers for school, and the foundation's grants helped launch it.

What was Carnegie's father's trade?

Handloom weaver. When steam-powered looms reached his town, hand weavers like him lost their work, and the family borrowed money to sail for America in 1848.

Which canal carried the newly arrived Carnegies west on their three-week journey from New York to Pittsburgh in 1848?

Erie Canal. Emigration agents steered the family onto slow canal boats because no railway yet reached Pittsburgh; Carnegie later noted that trains made the same trip in ten hours.

What was Carnegie's first job in America?

Bobbin boy in a cotton mill. He changed spools of thread from before dawn until after dark, then moved to a bobbin factory where he tended the boiler and steam engine.

What weekly wage did the young Carnegie earn in his first American job in 1848?

$1.20. He later wrote that none of the millions he made gave him as much happiness as that first week's pay, because it turned him into a breadwinner for his family.

What special skill did the teenage Carnegie develop as a telegraph messenger boy?

Reading incoming signals by ear. Most telegraphers read each message off a moving paper strip, so taking Morse by sound alone marked him out and soon won him promotion from messenger boy.

Which Pittsburgh colonel opened his 400-volume library to working boys each Saturday, inspiring Carnegie's later giving?

James Anderson. Carnegie, a messenger boy with no money for books, borrowed one every week and vowed that if wealth ever came to him, other poor boys would get the same chance.

Which railroad hired the teenage Carnegie in 1853 as private secretary to its superintendent Thomas A. Scott?

Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott paid him $35 a month, and by 1859 Carnegie had taken his mentor's old post as superintendent of its Pittsburgh division.

Carnegie's cousin Maria Hogan was among the first women an American railroad employed in which role?

Telegraph operator. By Carnegie's own account she ran the freight-station office in Pittsburgh and trained other young women there as her pupils.

By Carnegie's own account, how did his mother raise $500 for his first stock investment?

She mortgaged the family home, he wrote, arranging the loan through her brother; the first Adams Express dividend cheque showed him that money could earn money without his labour.

Carnegie arranged a merger between Theodore Woodruff's company and that of which rival for the Union Pacific contract?

George Pullman. By Carnegie's account the two sleeping-car companies were bidding against each other when he stopped his rival on a hotel staircase and proposed that they join forces instead.

What gashed Carnegie's cheek in 1861, letting him claim he had bled for the Union among its first defenders?

A sprung telegraph wire. By his own account, the wires had been staked to the ground near Washington, and when he freed them they whipped up into his face, so he reached the capital bleeding.

Carnegie's Keystone company erected the steel superstructure of the Eads Bridge, which spans the Mississippi at which city?

St. Louis. Railroads were pulling Midwestern trade towards Chicago, so the river city built the crossing to keep its place as a commercial hub, and it opened in 1874 after seven years of work.

In an 1868 memo to himself, Carnegie planned to quit business at 35 and settle where for a thorough education?

Oxford. At 33 and already earning $50,000 a year, he wrote that chasing more money would degrade him beyond hope of recovery; he never went, and stayed in business until 1901.

Which steelmaking method did Carnegie see in England in 1872 and build his first steel plant around?

Bessemer process. Cold air blasted through molten pig iron burned out the impurities in minutes, so relatively unskilled crews could make steel in bulk where skilled artisans had worked in small batches.

After whom did Carnegie name his first steel plant, which opened near Pittsburgh in 1875?

J. Edgar Thomson. He headed the railroad that was Carnegie's best customer, and the compliment was good business: the plant's first order was 2,000 steel rails for Thomson's own line.

Carnegie bought the coke fields, ore deposits, ships and railroads that fed his mills, a strategy known by what name?

Vertical integration. Owning every step from mine to mill let him drive down costs and undersell his rivals, and the consolidated Carnegie Steel Company came to dominate the American industry.

Who bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, creating U.S. Steel?

J. P. Morgan. Carnegie pencilled his asking price on a piece of paper and sent it to Wall Street, where the banker took one look and accepted without haggling.

Roughly what price did Carnegie's steel company fetch when he sold it in 1901?

About $480 million. The buyer merged the mills with rival firms to form U.S. Steel, the first corporation valued at more than a billion dollars, and Carnegie retired to give his fortune away.

Which Carnegie Steel president was go-between in the company's 1901 sale, then became the first head of U.S. Steel?

Charles M. Schwab. He had started as a labourer in a Carnegie mill and was running the company at 35; after a dinner with the buyer in December 1900 he carried the offer between the two men.

Drafted into the Union Army in 1864, how did Carnegie legally avoid going to war?

He paid a substitute to serve. The practice was common and legal, and he handed his replacement $850 when the government's own commutation fee was only $300.

When the 1901 sale closed, the buyer reportedly congratulated Carnegie on becoming what?

The richest man in the world. He spent his remaining 18 years giving nearly all of the money away.

Roughly how much money had Carnegie given away by the time he died in 1919?

About $350 million. That was roughly 90 percent of his fortune, yet for all his efforts he died with some $30 million unspent, which passed to his foundation and other charities.

Carnegie's 1889 essay urging the rich to use their fortunes for society is known by what title?

The Gospel of Wealth. It first ran in the North American Review as plain "Wealth", and was christened with its grander title only when it was reprinted in Britain.

Carnegie's 1889 essay praised which tax as a condemnation of "the selfish millionaire's unworthy life"?

Estate tax. He argued that men who hoard great sums all their lives owe the community its share at death, and he wanted the rates graduated so that the largest fortunes paid most.

Which word completes Carnegie's famous line "The man who dies thus rich dies ..."?

Disgraced. The line closes his 1889 essay on the duties of the rich, which held that a millionaire's surplus is a trust to be spent on the community during his own lifetime.

Carnegie's 1886 book Triumphant Democracy held the American republic superior to which system?

The British monarchy. The argument ran onto the binding itself, stamped with an inverted crown and a broken sceptre, and one London weekly dismissed it as a book of an essentially low type.

Which British prime minister, a friend of Carnegie's, asked for the millionaire's 1889 essay on giving to be reprinted in England?

William Gladstone. He thought the argument important enough to reprint, then answered it in print himself, defending inherited fortunes against Carnegie's call to give them away.

Roughly how many public libraries did Carnegie's money build worldwide between 1883 and 1929?

About 2,500. The usual tally is 2,509, and he sized each gift to the town that asked, usually paying about $2 for every resident.

Where did the very first Carnegie library open, in 1883?

Dunfermline. His father had helped found the town's first lending library by pooling books with his neighbours, and Carnegie's mother laid the new building's foundation stone in 1881.

What did Carnegie require of towns seeking libraries?

Locals had to provide the land and pay to run it, pledging about a tenth of his gift every year, because he believed in helping only those who would help themselves.

Which Baltimore library founder did Carnegie call "my pioneer"?

Enoch Pratt. Carnegie's 1889 essay on giving held the Baltimore merchant up as a model for rich men, and he later paid for new branches of Pratt's own library.

The first Carnegie library to open in the United States was in which Pennsylvania steel town?

Braddock. The library opened in 1889 in the mill town where he had started his first steel plant fourteen years earlier, among the workers whose labour had made his fortune.

Which composer conducted at the official opening of Carnegie Hall on 5 May 1891?

Tchaikovsky. The concert was the Russian composer's American debut, and the building was called simply the Music Hall until it was renamed a few years later for the man who paid for it.

By his own account, which gift drew charges in the Scottish Highlands that Carnegie was "demoralizing Christian worship"?

Church organs. Strict Presbyterians held that worship needed only the human voice, so he made each congregation pay half as a partner in his sin, and still funded more than 7,000 of them.

Which private detective agency's 300 armed guards arrived by barge to retake Carnegie's Homestead steelworks in July 1892?

Pinkerton. Locked-out workers fought the agents from the riverbank in a twelve-hour gun battle until the guards surrendered, and the state militia then moved in and took control of the town.

Where was Carnegie while the Homestead dispute peaked?

On a trip to Scotland. He left his partner Henry Clay Frick to handle the dispute, and American newspapers branded him a coward for sitting out the bloodshed an ocean away.

Which anarchist shot and wounded Frick during the Homestead crisis?

Alexander Berkman. He had no connection to the union, yet his failed attempt on Frick's life cost the locked-out steelworkers still more public sympathy.

Carnegie belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose badly maintained dam caused which 1889 disaster?

The Johnstown Flood. The dam held back the club's private pleasure lake 14 miles above the town, and when it gave way after heavy rain the wave killed more than 2,200 people.

To counter American imperialism, Carnegie personally offered $20 million to buy the independence of which territory?

The Philippines. His offer matched the $20 million the United States had just agreed to pay Spain for the islands, a purchase he denounced as imperialism.

Which Scottish estate did Carnegie buy in 1898 as a summer home?

Skibo Castle. After their daughter was born in 1897 his wife asked for a Highland home, and he paid £85,000 for the run-down estate.

Carnegie's New York mansion at 2 East 91st Street now houses which institution?

Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. He had asked his architects for "the most modest, plainest and most roomy house in New York", and the district around it took the name Carnegie Hill.

Which document did Carnegie's wife Louise sign, accepting that he would give his fortune away?

A prenuptial agreement. She signed it before their 1887 wedding, giving up any claim on his wealth and backing his plan to give nearly all of it away in his lifetime.

Carnegie gave $25,000 a year to a board promoting what cause?

Simplified spelling. He believed a more logical English would become the whole world's language and so bring peace, but in 1906 the House of Representatives voted to ban the new spellings from federal documents.

Carnegie's 1905 pension fund for American college professors evolved into which organisation?

TIAA-CREF. As a trustee of Cornell he was shocked to find professors paid too little to save for old age, so he endowed their pensions, and in 1918 his foundation set up the teachers' insurance association to carry the work on.

What did Carnegie establish in 1904 to reward civilians who risk their lives to save others?

The Hero Fund. A mine explosion near Pittsburgh that year killed two men who had gone in as rescuers, and within three months he had set aside $5 million to honour such people and support their dependants.

Carnegie paid $1.5 million in 1903 towards which building in The Hague?

The Peace Palace. His friend Andrew White, America's chief delegate at the 1899 Hague peace conference, urged him to give its new court of arbitration a home of its own.

By what nickname is the dinosaur skeleton known whose plaster casts Carnegie gave to museums across Europe?

Dippy. King Edward VII told Carnegie he would like such a skeleton for London's Natural History Museum, so Carnegie had the bones copied in plaster and the cast was unveiled there in 1905.

Carnegie donated $10 million in 1911 to speed the building of the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at which observatory?

Mount Wilson. "I hope the work at Mount Wilson will be vigorously pushed," he wrote, anxious to hear its results before he died; first used in 1917, it was the largest telescope in the world.

Where is Carnegie buried?

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, New York. He had always wanted a simple funeral, so no eulogy was spoken over him, and he lies in the same cemetery as the writer Washington Irving.

Which Scottish university did Carnegie serve as Lord Rector until 1907?

St Andrews. He wrote that the post admitted him to the university world, to which he had been a stranger, and he prepared for his address by reading those of earlier rectors such as John Stuart Mill.

The Pittsburgh technical institute Carnegie founded in 1900 later became which institution?

Carnegie Mellon University. He pictured a trade school for Pittsburgh's working-class men and women, giving certificates rather than degrees; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and merged with the Mellon Institute in 1967.

Which giant cactus carries the scientific name Carnegiea gigantea in Carnegie's honour?

The saguaro. Botanists Britton and Rose renamed it to honour the man whose Carnegie Institution ran a desert laboratory among the giant cacti at Tucson, Arizona.

Carnegie spent his last summers at Shadowbrook, the estate where he died in 1919, in which resort region?

The Berkshires. Unable to return to his Highland castle in his last years, he bought the Gilded Age mansion in western Massachusetts and died there of pneumonia in August 1919, aged 83.

Which labour leader is buried close to Carnegie's grave?

Samuel Gompers. The first president of the American Federation of Labor was buried in 1924 in a plot opposite that of the steelmaker whose Homestead lockout had been a major defeat for organised labour.

Carnegie's memoirs break off for good at the outbreak of which war?

The First World War began months after he funded the Church Peace Union to make war obsolete; his wife wrote that his heart was broken and he could never take up the memoirs again.

Which $10 million body did Carnegie create in 1910 to work toward ending war?

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was first led by Elihu Root, a former US Secretary of War who went on to win the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize.

Carnegie's only child, born in 1897, was named after whom?

His mother, Margaret, lived with him in a hotel, and he would not marry in her lifetime; she died in November 1886, and he wed Louise Whitfield the following April.

Which former president did Carnegie fund on an African expedition in 1909?

Theodore Roosevelt thanked Carnegie's generous help in his book on the safari; Carnegie had joked to the Kaiser about yoking the two men together, and hoped the ex-president would talk him toward peace.

Which Dunfermline estate did he buy and open to the public?

A statue of Carnegie was raised there in 1913-14, and the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust still benefits the town of his birth.