Highlights
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2024-01-17 19:08 And as a Chartist, William Carnegie believed that the way to make change was to get working men elected into parliament so that they could make change at the legislative level that would help working men like him. If you’re not familiar with the term Chartist, that sort of sums up the whole thing. It was a national working class effort at parliamentary reform. So William and his brother in law, Tom Morrison, both were committed to the Chartist cause. They were organizing strikes, they were writing for Chartist publications.
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2024-01-17 19:08 And to be clear, this was a lot of risk. Once they got to the United States, they would have less than nothing. They had to sell all their belongings and then borrow money on top of that just to pay for the voyage. The Carnegie’s, that’s William, Margaret, Andrew and Andrew’s younger brother Thomas, crammed into small quarters on the Wiccaset, which is a ship sailing from Glasgow for a 50 day voyage. No surprise.
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2024-01-17 19:09 Carnegie would later write that if you washed the soot off your face and your hands, they would be coated again an hour later. And it wasn’t a place where a newcomer family with no money could live in any kind of comfort. He described this as a more or less miserable situation. William Carnegie did find work. He got a job working in a cotton factory. And for a while, Andrew worked in the same factory as a bobbin boy. He was paid a dollar 20 per week to run bobbins to the Weavers as needed, and on occasion, to perform maintenance tasks on the machines. Later in his life, Carnegie wrote of this time, quote, it was a hard life. In the winter, father and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness. Reach the factory before it was daylight, and with a short interval for lunch work till after dark.
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2024-01-17 19:09 And he wrote adoringly about her, saying, quote, there was nothing that heroine did not do for the struggle we were making for elbow room in the western world. Yeah, Andrew was very close to his mother, and that relationship will be really important to how his life plays out a little bit later.
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2024-01-17 20:55 Carnegie was once again doing really well because he carried that same work ethic into every position he had. And he was making a name for himself at the Pennsylvania Railroad.
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2024-01-17 20:55 William died in 1855 when Andrew was 20, and that left the eldest son as the primary breadwinner in the family.
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2024-01-17 20:55 A year after William’s death, Andrew started to expand out his business efforts. He invested in the Woodruff sleeping car company with a loan, and it paid off.
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2024-01-17 20:56 And meanwhile, his earnings from that sleeping car company investment went toward a new business venture. He invested $11,000 in oil in 1861, and he almost doubled his money in the first year.
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2024-01-17 20:59 And by the time the war ended, Andrew Carnegie had come to the realization that the iron industry had great potential. And in a surprising move, he left the Pennsylvania Railroad and he started a new company in 1865 called the Keystone Bridge Company.
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2024-01-17 21:02 But then, when Carnegie was almost 37, he learned about Henry Bessemer’s refining process that could convert large amounts of iron into steel. And he learned about that while he was visiting Bessemer’s plants in England.