Andrew Carnegie steel empire and philanthropy

Appears in 1 lecture.

Appearances across the corpus

MSE_F2017_05 · Materials Selection and Economics, Fall 2017 · §8.p1

Carnegie's rise via Bessemer steel, his quote ("Take away my people, leave my factories..."), his philanthropy (Carnegie libraries, Carnegie Mellon), juxtaposed with Rockefeller [misspoken as "Roosevelt"] handing out dimes. Tom's grandfather's role at the University of Chattanooga briefly invoked.

You had this guy who was one of the greatest British scientists of all time. In 1856 he developed — this is his original Bessemer converter. He would take the cast iron and blow oxygen in here, and he essentially came up with a way to make puddled iron without puddling it — you blow air into cast iron and turn it into steel. That's the beginning of the Bessemer Age, of Andrew Carnegie becoming the richest man in the world. It's an interesting story that could be a good paper — how Andrew Carnegie did some sort of shady things in Pennsylvania and ended up with part of a steel company. He became the richest man in the world, so far as anyone we know, in modern times, in constant dollars. He actually was a very kind Scotsman in many ways.