Iron Will, Golden Heart: Andrew Carnegie

Imagine being born to a handloom weaver, to someone who even struggled to make ends meet. Meet Andrew Carnegie who was born in 1835, in Scotland into a poor family but yet lived his life through philanthropy.

Despite all the difficulty, Carnegie became a messenger in a telegraph office at the age of 14. He soon caught the eye of Thomas Scott, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, who made Carnegie his private secretary.

During his trips to Britain he came to meet steelmakers. Foreseeing the future demand for iron and steel, Carnegie left the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 and started managing the Keystone Bridge Company.

Any technological innovation that could reduce the cost of making steel was speedily adopted, and in the 1890s Carnegie’s mills introduced the basic open-hearth furnace into American steelmaking.

Andrew Carnegie soon sold his company to J.P. Morgan’s newly formed United States Steel Corporation for a stunning $480,000,000 in the year 1901.

He subsequently retired and devoted himself to his philanthropic activities, which, soon led him to become one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.

One of his lifelong interests was the establishment of free public libraries to make available to everyone a means of self-education. In addition to funding libraries, he paid for thousands of church organs in the United States and around the world

Andrew Carnegie was fond of saying, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced." Throughout his life he made a fortune, and unlike any industrialist of his time, he also began systematically giving it away.

His life is an open testimony to the fact that, when wealth, combined with a commitment to philanthropy, can easily alter the trajectory of the global economy as a whole.