Carnegie: The Man

Photograph of Andrew Carnegie

To better understand how Carnegie revolutionized steelmaking, it’s important to know his industry background. Throughout his early life, Carnegie climbed the corporate food chain. He worked in a cotton mill, then as a telegraph boy until he was hired as a telegraph operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (PRR).¹ During his time at the PRR, Carnegie had investments in many different companies. He formed the Freedom Iron Company in 1861 to manufacture iron rails for railroads and merged Freedom Iron with Cyclops Iron Company in 1865, forming the Union Iron Mills.²

By 1866, Carnegie’s major investments included the likes of Columbia Oil, the Central Transportation Company, Adams Express, and several banks and insurance companies. Of the companies that he owned, there were the Union Iron Mills, the Freedom Iron and Steel Company, the Keystone Bridge Company, the Superior Rail Mill, and the Pennsylvania Locomotive Works.³ Suffice to say, Carnegie knew his way around the business world.

As a businessman, Carnegie was always seeking innovation. He was always looking for a new way to cut costs or increase profits, with almost nothing stopping this search. An example of this can be seen through Carnegie’s “scrap heap” policy. Through this policy, if Carnegie found he could get better performance or reduced operating costs by changing out an existing piece of mill equipment, it would be done without hesitation, the old equipment literally being thrown in a scrap heap in at his plants.⁴