Andrew Carnegie wealth and steel industry founding

[Tom holds up a steel test plate from a nuclear submarine hull.] The fourth member of the billion-ton-per-year club is steel. This is the closest thing I have to an I-beam; with I-beams we build bridges and buildings. This is a piece of steel from a nuclear submarine hull, or actually test plate for a nuclear submarine. Steel is about 1.6 billion tons a year, but at about $500 a ton it is the closest thing to a trillion-dollar-a-year economy. The richest person in the world to date that we know of was Andrew Carnegie. He was richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and all these other people in constant dollars. And he made his money off steel. This department at MIT was known as the metallurgy department. Metallurgy didn't start until the 1880s, and steel was the thing that built railroads, and it still is one of the primary structural materials, but not the most common.

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