One March day in 1901, Andrew Carnegie signed the papers that sold his steelmaking properties to the United States Steel Corporation. His personal share of the purchase price, invested in 5 percent bonds, guaranteed him an income of more than $1 million a month for the rest of his life. His thoughts may well have turned back fifty-two years to the day he got his first job. He was thirteen years old, and the job was changing bobbins (spools of thread) in a cotton mill, from sunrise to sunset each day except Sunday, for $1.20 a week. He had come a long way in half a century.

It was no wonder, then, that Carnegie was an optimist. “All my ducks are swans,” he once said, and declared his motto to be “the truth of evolution,” which was “All is well since all grows better.” He rose to wealth on a great tide of national development, scientific discovery, and expansion in manufacturing. He saw his career as clear proof that a kindly universe took special care of him, and of the English-speaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic between which he divided his affection. For eighteen years after his retirement, he devoted his life to a program of gift-giving that he believed would help to make the world an even better place. These donations added up to nearly $350 million. Along with them went thousands of words written by Carnegie about his favorite subject - himself. Of all the great business tycoons, he was the one who best combined good luck, good management, and foresight with charm and conceit. The story of his two careers - as a maker and a giver of wealth - shows all of these forces at work.

The Carnegie story did not begin happily. Ironically, the same machine age that made Andrew’s fortune threw his father out of work in Scotland in the 1840s. William Carnegie was a handloom weaver in the historic town of Dunfermline. Though he and his wife, Margaret Morrison Carnegie, became desperately poor in terms of money, their legacy to Andrew and his younger brother Tom was rich in every other way. William was an insatiable reader, with a romantic devotion to Scottish history. A political radical himself, William married the daughter of a prominent agitator in the cause of political reform. Margaret was the dominant influence in the household, and it was she who had the idea of emigrating to America, where the entire family could make a new start. They borrowed passage money from a friend, sold their household possessions, and, in 1848, made the seven-weeks-long voyage from Glasgow to New York.

The Carnegie family settled near Pittsburgh, and William found work in a cotton factory. Young Andrew’s first job, in the same mill, was taken to help the family’s in its struggle to make ends meet. Soon after, he went to work in another factory, for sixty cents more a week, tending a boiler in the basement, a dark, cheerless job. But almost at once, his luck turned.

The factory owner, finding out that young Carnegie had some schooling and wrote neatly, promoted him to office duties. Andrew was grateful to move to a job that was cleaner, lighter, and less exhausting. He was also able to save some of his energies for constant spare-time reading. A retentive memory and alert, probing mind enabled him to develop his interests in politics and science, as well as in the classics of English and Scottish literature. His ability to quote Burns and Shakespeare freely would stand him in good stead later when he mixed with men of better formal education than he. He was learning to use to the full every opportunity and advantage that came his way.

Presently a friend of the Carnegies’ offered Andrew a job as a telegraph messenger, at $2.50 a week. Gratefully, he took the upward step and gave the work attentive study. As he said in later life, whatever he undertook he must “push inordinately.” Soon he knew many of Pittsburgh’s leading businessmen by sight and could deliver messages to them instantly. More important, while waiting in the telegraph office for messages to come in, he taught himself Morse code and was able to graduate to the rank of operator. His speed and intelligence were soon noticed by Thomas A. Scott, then Pittsburg division superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who hired him as a personal clerk and telegraph operator.

Thus, at seventeen, Andrew Carnegie had reason to feel that hard work and a pleasing way with important men were the first steps to success. His new salary of $35 per month seemed enormous; he hardly knew what to do with the money. When his father died two years later, Carnegie welcomed the opportunity to become his mother’s main support, and took the responsibility seriously enough to remain unmarried until after her death in 1886. He was still reading widely, visiting the theater now and then, and writing occasional letters to Pittsburgh newspapers, or even to the far-off New York Tribune.

Carnegie’s literary ambitions did not interfere with his learning railroading from the bottom up. One morning, that study paid off. An accident had temporarily tied up a section of the Pennsylvania’s line. Trains could not move until dispatching orders were sent out and wrecking crews assigned. And Superintendent Scott could not be located. Andrew Carnegie thought for a while and then began tapping his key swiftly. He sent out a series of telegrams, under Scott’s name, that cleared the track, untangled the snarl, and put traffic on the road once more. When Scott finally appeared, Carnegie rather nervously told him what he had done. Scott said not a word but later boasted to others about the exploit of his “little white-haired devil.”

Scott’s appreciation was shown in a quick series of promotions for Carnegie. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, Andrew had Scott’s old job as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division. When Scott was called to Washington to take charge of railroads and telegraphs, as an Assistant Secretary of War, it was Carnegie, aged twenty-five, whom he took to work with him.

In fact, Scott had shown another interest in Carnegie’s career that was to prove even more significant. Scott was a master businessman, who would later become president of the Pennsylvania Railroad as well as of the Union Pacific and the Texas & Pacific railroads, and he knew a shrewd investment when he saw one. When he suggested, in 1855, that if Carnegie had $500 he would be wise to buy ten shares of stock in the Adams Express Company, Andrew did not hesitate to mortgage the home he had bought for his mother. His first dividend came soon after. From this beginning grew a regular series of investments. First small sums, and then larger ones, went into a bank, an oil well or two, a railroad, a company for manufacturing sleeping cars, and an insurance company. As fast as dividends were earned - they came generously in the economic boom of Civil War days - they were plowed into new stock. Carnegie was a Pittsburgh man, and since Pittsburgh was a center of the iron trade, he naturally began betting on the future of iron.

In 1865, Carnegie joined with H. J. Linville, John L. Piper, and Aaron Shiffler, who designed bridges for the Pennsylvania Railroad, to form the Keystone Bridge Company. Its purpose was to build the iron bridges that were rapidly replacing wooden ones on progressive railroads. In 1864, he organized a rail-making concern, and in 1866, a locomotive works. In 1867, Andrew, his brother Tom, and fellow Pittsburghers Thomas Miller, Henry Phipps, and Andrew Kloman as partners, set up the Union Iron Mills.

Looking after these investments was a full-time job, and in 1865, Carnegie left the Pennsylvania Railroad’s payroll. But he kept his friendship with Tom Scott, and with the

Pennsylvania’s president, J. Edgar Thomson, which helped him to get plenty of orders for his ironware from their railroad. In turn, recognizing Carnegie as a super-salesman, the Pennsylvania sent him to Europe in 1872 to sell $5 million worth of its bonds. The job earned him a commission of $150,000.

Carnegie’s major contribution to the various firms in which he was a partner was his knack of winning influential friends. The factories were superintended by men like Andrew Kloman, a skilled foundry foreman, while others, like Henry Phipps, deftly managed bookkeeping transactions. In 1867, Carnegie moved his headquarters from Pittsburgh to New York, a better center for sales operations. To John W. Garrett, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad president, he sold many an iron-bridge contract, in part because the two men shared a fondness for Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1869, he sold $4 million worth of bonds to Junius Morgan (J. P. Morgan’s banker father) in London, after impressing the financier by using the then-new and expensive Atlantic cable to relay a question to America and get an immediate reply.

Carnegie seemed to take more pleasure in influencing men than in making money at this time. A private memorandum, written when he was thirty-three years old, reveals his feelings. He was earning $50,000 a year. He hoped, in two more years, to retire from business management on this income, settle near Oxford to “get a thorough education,” and buy up a “newspaper or live review and give the general management of it attention, taking a part in public matters.” Between 1869 and 1872, however, in the course of his frequent trips to England, Carnegie became convinced that an important new age of steel was just dawning. He determined to create a huge supply of that “gleaming metal upon which civilization advances.” That meant transferring his investments into steel - or, as he later described it, his policy became “to put all good eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.” He was to have thirty years of watching before he could retire.

In fact, Carnegie was jumping on a moving bandwagon. The first cheap method of manufacturing steel on a large scale had been patented by an English inventor, Sir Henry Bessemer, in 1855. The Bessemer process was simple and spectacular: Air was forced, under pressure, into a huge, egg-shaped blast furnace full of molten pig iron; the impurities in the iron were oxidized, under intense heat, and shot away in a shower of sparks from the top of the converter. The liquid metal left behind needed only the addition of ferromanganese to become top-quality steel. English manufacturers were soon making their fortunes with this process. By 1870, American pioneers like Alexander Holley were beginning to turn out Bessemer steel on more than an experimental basis in the United States.

American railroads had an apparently inexhaustible appetite for tough, flexible, long-lasting steel rails. Armies and navies needed steel guns and steel plate; bridges and buildings would shortly need steel girders and supports. There was a market for millions of tons of steel a year, and a tariff of $28 a ton on imported steel reserved that market for American manufacturers. Carnegie saw Pittsburgh as an ideal center for steel-making activities. Surrounded by beds of coal that would make good coke (a vital ingredient in steelmaking), it had easy connections by rail and ship to the great iron ore beds of Lake Superior. In addition, the city was full of experienced metallurgists and engineers who had learned their business in the iron trade.

In 1873, Carnegie and his partners built a steel mill at Braddock, Pennsylvania, and named it after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. J. Edgar Thomson. It was a booming success from the start. Carnegie had a genius for surrounding himself with smart men. One of his master strokes was putting a sturdy Welsh Civil War veteran, “Captain” William Jones, in charge of the army of workmen. Bill Jones drove his sweaty legions of American, Welsh, and Irish “hands” to break one production record after another. Years later, Carnegie told of trying to reward Jones with a partnership in the company and of being turned down.

“I don’t want to have my thoughts running on business,” Jones said. “I have enough trouble looking after these works. Just give me a hell of a salary if you think I’m worth it.”

“All right, Captain, the salary of the President of the United States is yours.”

“That’s the talk,” said the little Welshman.

Carnegie tirelessly booked orders for his steel mill, exerting all his charm and ability to do so. Yet he was a hard man as well as a capable and genial one. He constantly needled his production teams for new achievements. (Once, he was explaining to his plant officials how much relief he got from business cares on his yearly vacations. “And, oh Lord,” said Bill Jones, “think of the relief we all get.”) Increased output meant lower costs, so Carnegie relentlessly undersold competitors and refused to join in any of the price-fixing agreements that were becoming common in industry during the 1880s. He reduced steel rail prices from $160 a ton in 1875 to $17 a ton at the century’s end, and he could still turn a neat profit.

The little Scot shrewdly invested in ore lands and ships to carry the precious minerals from mine to blast furnace. In 1882, to protect his supply of coke, he made an alliance with Henry Clay Frick, a sharp-dealing ex-store clerk who had bought the best coking coal lands in Pennsylvania. Seven years later. Frick became a Carnegie partner and chairman of the firm. He was noted for hiring Italian, Hungarian, and Slavic workers who were hard to unionize, and driving them mercilessly, Carnegie kept away from this end of the business as much as possible. But after the bloody Homestead strike of 1892, when Frick ordered out Pinkerton armed guards to control the strikers at Carnegie’s Homestead steel mills, and a running battle ensued, public outcry was directed as much at Carnegie, who had been on vacation in Scotland, as at Frick himself. The two men later parted company as the result of a bitter quarrel.

As the steel business got bigger, Carnegie bought out rival plants and issued stock, but never to the public at large. He shared it with a few partners but kept most of it himself. If one partner chose to sell out, the others took over his interest. Although Carnegie and his associates drove a hard bargain, the partnership was generally open to enterprising young men who rose from the ranks. One of them was Charles M. Schwab, who started as a dollar-a-day laborer and ended by replacing Frick as Carnegie’s chief lieutenant.

By 1900, the United States had become the world’s leader in steel production. Under Carnegie’s continuing policy of keeping control tightly in his own hands, driving down costs, and outselling competitors, the Carnegie Steel Company was earning incredible profits. In 1900, they came to $40 million, of which Carnegie’s own share was $25 million. The eggs in his basket had, indeed, done well.

The end of Carnegie’s active career shows a side of his nature that he often kept hidden. He sometimes liked to give the impression that his success was due to his ability to hire men, in his words, “far cleverer than myself,” and to back them when they ordered new and costly improvements in his plants. But Carnegie was no figurehead. In 1900, it became known that he was eager to sell out, and retire. The manufacture of finished steel articles was then largely in the hands of a few supercorporations: the Federal Steel Company, the National Tube Company, American Steel and Wire, American Tin Plate, and American Steel Hoop. The heads of these concerns decided that it would be profitable to have their own supply of crude steel, independent of Carnegie. They announced plans to erect blast furnaces and rolling mills. Their reasoning was that a tired Carnegie would easily be induced, by the threat of a price war, to sell out to a steelmaking combine on its own terms.

Into Carnegie’s eyes came the light of battle. Telegraphed orders from Skibo Castle, his summer retreat in the Scottish highlands, bombarded Pittsburgh. The Carnegie Steel Company promptly declared it was going to manufacture its own forms of finished steel. It would open factories to produce tubes and steel rods. Perhaps later it would manufacture wire and tin plate too. Just for good measure, it would build a new railroad from Pittsburgh to the Atlantic and take away the steel traffic of the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio.

The other steel giants did not want a war that would endanger their own investments, and neither did J. P. Morgan. He arranged to have Carnegie bought out for almost $500 million. Even at sixty-five, Andrew Carnegie knew how to meet threats with threats. He had outlasted his enemies in a game of bluff.

Now, at last, Carnegie was free to travel, to study, to meet the great - and to give! The why and wherefore of his charities was spelled out in a number of articles and books. The most famous of the articles appeared in 1889, and became known by the title it was given when reprinted in England, “The Gospel of Wealth.”

Carnegie said Darwin’s theory of evolution proved that life was a struggle among species for existence. Only the fittest survived. Business life, too, was a war for survival. Those who came out on top of the competitive heap were naturally the fittest. The small businessman who could not compete with the large, efficient corporation might seem to suffer. Evolution was hard on the dinosaur, too. But the human race was better off in the long run with a flood of cheap, mass-produced goods as its compensation for loss of individualism.

It was a law of nature therefore, that some men became wealthy. They were gifted with a natural talent for outstripping others in moneymaking, under the “law of competition.” But they had a duty to perform. They must use their surplus wealth to promote the good of the community. They must not squander their money in piecemeal charity but instead support those activities that helped the “fittest” of the next generation to emerge. “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” Carnegie ended.

This was rather like John D. Rockefeller’s idea of himself as a “steward” of God, but Carnegie, a free thinker, replaced God with evolution. His point was that much of the surplus wealth of a growing society was bound to flow into the hands of a particular small group of men, not just because they were lucky, or crafty, or simply smart and hard-working. It was because nature herself had stamped them as “the best.” This handful of millionaires should then decide how the multiplied millions of new wealth should be used among their less favored fellow humans.

Conceited or not, Carnegie was a happy man. Few men have a fortune to give away in the promotion of their pet ideas. He did. His charities reflected all his favorite notions. As a boy, he had loved to read, and he still believed that bookish boys were not likely to be idle or wasteful. So he gave $60 million to build, or help build, some 2,800 library buildings in the United States and the United Kingdom. Another $30 million went to various British and American universities. Because the marvels of science seemed to Carnegie the key to man’s eternal advancement, he donated approximately $22 million each to a Carnegie Institute in Washington and another in Pittsburgh, and $125 million to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. All three fostered research not only in the natural and social sciences but in the legal and educational fields as well.

Carnegie also thought that music should always bring joy to the worship of God, and he gave $6 million to a special fund for buying church organs. Another $29 million went to endow pensions for underpaid college professors. Pension funds for selected steelworkers absorbed millions more. A specific fund was set up to provide recreation and education for the people of his native town of Dunfermline, and the Carnegie Hero Funds gave medals as well as pensions for acts of unusual bravery in peacetime.

Managing these many projects kept Carnegie from feeling old and used up. He was showered with honorary degrees by universities, given civic honors in innumerable towns, and introduced on equal terms to some of the most eminent men of the day. He was proud to claim friendship with Presidents Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt; with Britain’s Prime Ministers Gladstone and Lloyd George; and with writers like Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold, and John Morley.

Among Carnegie’s favorite projects was the promotion of world peace. Though some of the steel he sold went into arms, Carnegie detested and abhorred war. He longed to see closer cooperation between the two English-speaking giants, the United States and Great Britain. He gave $1.5 million to build the Peace Palace at The Hague, and $10 million more, in 1910, to establish the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was supposed to promote ways of abolishing war. Yet this last-named Carnegie charity had the saddest fate of all. In August of 1914, the world he had believed so modern and progressive did go to war. In the notes he was making for his autobiography, Carnegie sadly wrote, “Men slaying each other like wild beasts! I dare not relinquish all hope.” His patriotism forced him to approve first Britain’s and then America’s entry into the bitter fight which dragged on for four years and cost nearly 10 million lives. Steel became associated almost exclusively with the material for shells, cannons, and bayonets; and Carnegie, for whom it had been the embodiment of progress, grieved profoundly. The happy, bustling old philanthropist suddenly retired from the public eye and broke off his memoirs at the year 1914. In 1919, after a brief illness, he died. As his wife said, “His heart was broken.”

The career of the happiest millionaire ended, after all, with a sense of defeat. Perhaps evolution did not always work in a kindly and improving fashion, as he had believed. Nevertheless, it did keep on working. The year Andrew Carnegie died was the heyday for a man whom some called “the last billionaire.” He was Henry Ford, who put America in a wheeled contraption made of Carnegie steel and driven by Rockefeller’s petroleum. With him, a new age of industry was to open the era of mass production, of unionism, of automation, and the period when one man could wield absolute power in business was to close forever.