Andrew Carnegie Biography
Andrew Carnegie Biography
Andrew Carnegie always thought reading was one of the best ways to learn. He was also a very generous person in the industrial revolution. To be very generous in donations you do need money, and he definitely had a lot of money to be generous. This generosity completed the industrial revolution.
He made most of his money with his steel company called the Carnegie Steel Company. The Carnegie steel company then changed to the United States Steel Corporation. In one year,1900, his company made forty million dollars, in which twenty-five million went to him alone. He capped off all of his money making by selling his huge Steel Corporation to J. P. Morgan. For selling this company Carnegie made over two hundred fifty million dollars.
He was very generous with all of his money, mostly by funding free libraries. One of the first things he gave was free public baths in Dunfermline, Scotland, where he was born. He funded free public baths as early as 1869. The first library he funded was built in Scotland in 1881.
He funded libraries mostly because he was a big reader himself. He self-taught himself by reading books, and he knew that books brought him all the way to the top. He wanted other people to have the same opportunity as he had by reading books themselves. One of Carnegie’s legendary saying was "Free to the People," which is carved in stone over the doors of The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
Andrew Carnegie would not live forever to keep funding the libraries, though. He had to come up with an idea that would make it so the libraries would have workers and buy new books. A library without workers would just run out of time, and the same thing would happen if the library never bought any new books. To avoid this, Carnegie thought of "The Carnegie Formula." This meant that the town in which a library was donated would have to pay at least ten-percent of the cost of the library’s building cost per year.
Andrew Carnegie had given away more than any other person up to that point in America. Before he died he had given away a total of three hundred fifty million, six hundred ninety-five...