Carnegie's Steel Mill and the Bessemer Age
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
In eighteen seventy-five, Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a river town just east of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela. He named it the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works, after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, his biggest customer, in a move of calculated flattery that illustrated how Carnegie operated. The mill introduced the Bessemer process to American steel production at scale, and it changed everything.
Carnegie had arrived in Pittsburgh at age thirteen as a Scottish immigrant boy whose family had no money. He worked as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, then a telegraph messenger, then a telegraph operator. He learned the railroad business from the inside at the Pennsylvania Railroad. He watched how capital compounded, invested shrewdly, and by the time he built the Thomson Works he was already a wealthy man. But steel was the thing that would make him the richest man in the world.
The Bessemer converter blew air through molten iron, burning off impurities and producing steel in minutes rather than days. Carnegie drove his mills at blistering pace. Workers labored twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, earning roughly ten dollars per week. Fatal accidents were common and rarely recorded with precision. The mills ran day and night, and the sky above Braddock and Pittsburgh's river valleys was rarely dark.
By eighteen eighty-nine, the United States had become the world's largest steel producer, and Carnegie controlled roughly one quarter of that output. In nineteen hundred and one he sold Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan's newly organized United States Steel Corporation for four hundred ninety-two million dollars. Carnegie's share was two hundred twenty-six million dollars, the equivalent of billions today.
He spent the rest of his life giving most of it away, building twenty-five hundred libraries worldwide, funding Carnegie Mellon University, endowing Carnegie Hall in New York, and establishing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
