Andrew Carnegie Trivia
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60 free Andrew Carnegie trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Andrew Carnegie arrived in Pennsylvania at 12, earned 1.20 dollars a week changing bobbins, and 53 years later sold his steel company for more than 300 million dollars and set about giving almost all of it away. This quiz covers the climb: the one-room weaver's cottage in Dunfermline, the telegraph office where he learned to read signals by ear, Colonel Anderson's library, Tom Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad, sleeping cars, the Civil War telegraphs, the Keystone Bridge Company and the Eads Bridge, and the Bessemer steel empire that J. P. Morgan bought in 1901. It also covers the shadows and the giving: the Johnstown Flood club, the Homestead lockout and the Pinkertons, Frick and the assassination attempt, Triumphant Democracy and The Gospel of Wealth, "the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced", 2,509 libraries, Carnegie Hall's opening night with Tchaikovsky, the Hero Fund, the Peace Palace, Skibo Castle, simplified spelling and the dinosaur named Dippy. Easy questions ask where he was born and what he made; the expert tier asks for dollar figures, dates and names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Carnegie, Carnegie libraries and Carnegie Hall, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller and Pittsburgh.
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Q 01Which children's television show, first aired in 1969, was created with grants from Andrew Carnegie's main foundation?
Sesame Street
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.
Q 02What was Carnegie's father's trade?
Handloom weaver
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.
Q 03Which canal carried the newly arrived Carnegies west on their three-week journey from New York to Pittsburgh in 1848?
Erie Canal
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.
Q 04What was Carnegie's first job in America?
Bobbin boy in a cotton mill
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.
Q 05What weekly wage did the young Carnegie earn in his first American job in 1848?
$1.20
$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.
Q 06What special skill did the teenage Carnegie develop as a telegraph messenger boy?
Reading incoming signals by ear
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.
Q 07Which Pittsburgh colonel opened his 400-volume library to working boys each Saturday, inspiring Carnegie's later giving?
James Anderson
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.
Q 08Which railroad hired the teenage Carnegie in 1853 as private secretary to its superintendent Thomas A. Scott?
Pennsylvania Railroad
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.
Q 09Carnegie's cousin Maria Hogan was among the first women an American railroad employed in which role?
Telegraph operator
Telegraph operator. By Carnegie's own account she ran the freight-station office in Pittsburgh and trained other young women there as her pupils.
Q 10By Carnegie's own account, how did his mother raise $500 for his first stock investment?
She mortgaged the family home
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.
Q 11Carnegie arranged a merger between Theodore Woodruff's company and that of which rival for the Union Pacific contract?
George Pullman
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.
Q 12What gashed Carnegie's cheek in 1861, letting him claim he had bled for the Union among its first defenders?
A sprung telegraph wire
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.
Q 13Carnegie's Keystone company erected the steel superstructure of the Eads Bridge, which spans the Mississippi at which city?
Q 21Drafted into the Union Army in 1864, how did Carnegie legally avoid going to war?
He paid a substitute to serve
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.
Q 22When the 1901 sale closed, the buyer reportedly congratulated Carnegie on becoming what?
The richest man in the world
The richest man in the world. He spent his remaining 18 years giving nearly all of the money away.
Q 23Roughly how much money had Carnegie given away by the time he died in 1919?
About $350 million
St. Louis
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.
Q 14In an 1868 memo to himself, Carnegie planned to quit business at 35 and settle where for a thorough education?
Oxford
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.
Q 15Which steelmaking method did Carnegie see in England in 1872 and build his first steel plant around?
Bessemer process
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.
Q 16After whom did Carnegie name his first steel plant, which opened near Pittsburgh in 1875?
J. Edgar Thomson
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.
Q 17Carnegie bought the coke fields, ore deposits, ships and railroads that fed his mills, a strategy known by what name?
Vertical integration
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.
Q 18Who bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, creating U.S. Steel?
J. P. Morgan
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.
Q 19Roughly what price did Carnegie's steel company fetch when he sold it in 1901?
About $480 million
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.
Q 20Which Carnegie Steel president was go-between in the company's 1901 sale, then became the first head of U.S. Steel?
Charles M. Schwab
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.
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.
Q 24Carnegie's 1889 essay urging the rich to use their fortunes for society is known by what title?
The Gospel of Wealth
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.
Q 25Carnegie's 1889 essay praised which tax as a condemnation of "the selfish millionaire's unworthy life"?
Estate tax
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.
Q 26Which word completes Carnegie's famous line "The man who dies thus rich dies ..."?
disgraced
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.
Q 27Carnegie's 1886 book Triumphant Democracy held the American republic superior to which system?
The British monarchy
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.
Q 28Which British prime minister, a friend of Carnegie's, asked for the millionaire's 1889 essay on giving to be reprinted in England?
William Gladstone
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.
Q 29Roughly how many public libraries did Carnegie's money build worldwide between 1883 and 1929?
About 2,500
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.
Q 30Where did the very first Carnegie library open, in 1883?
Dunfermline
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.