Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/118

 become a great founder of free libraries, he declared that it was his own personal experience which led him to value a library beyond all other forms of beneficence.

In 1853 Carnegie was appointed clerk and telegraph operator to Thomas A. Scott, assistant superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Two years afterwards Scott asked his youthful clerk if he could find five hundred dollars to invest in the Adams Express stock. The dollars were raised by mortgaging a small cottage which the Carnegie family had acquired. The Adams Express investment was followed by a successful railway sleeping-car venture with T. T. Woodruff. Having been shown a model of a car by Woodruff, Carnegie divined that the invention was destined to become an ‘important adjunct of railway travelling’. The Woodruff Company was ultimately absorbed by the famous Pullman Car Company. In 1859 Scott became vice-president of the railroad company, and appointed Carnegie superintendent of the western division of the line. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Carnegie accompanied Scott, then assistant secretary for war, to the front. During the Civil War iron reached 180 dollars a ton and, new rails being scarce, the railway systems of America were regarded as ‘fast becoming dangerous’. Quick to grasp the situation, Carnegie organized a rail manufacturing company, and at the same time launched the Pittsburg Locomotive Works. Fires in connexion with railway wooden bridges led to the formation of the Keystone Iron Bridge Company. Wealth flowed in to Carnegie from all three concerns, and he and his colleagues found another profitable investment in the oil wells of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

A visit to England in 1867 convinced Carnegie that the Bessemer converter would revolutionize the iron industry, and, hurrying back, he formed a new combination and raised capital for the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which were erected on a site of 1,200 acres near Pittsburg. By 1881 Carnegie was the foremost ironmaster in America, and the capital of the concerns controlled by Carnegie Brothers and Company was estimated at five million dollars. Of the total, Carnegie was credited with 2,737,977 dollars. By 1888 his wealth had increased sixty times over, and in 1899 when the various interests were vested in the Carnegie Steel Company, the profits were forty million dollars.

In 1900 Carnegie issued his book The Gospel of Wealth to emphasize a doctrine which he had proclaimed from many platforms that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced’. He then decided to ‘cease to struggle for more wealth’ and to take up ‘the more serious and difficult task of wise distribution’. The great Carnegie steel concern was accordingly sold to the United States Steel Corporation for the colossal sum of £89,000,000 (1901), and Carnegie retired from business the same year. Of this total, £60,000,000 represented Carnegie’s share. Free from the cares of the steel company, Carnegie inaugurated his task of ‘wise distribution’ of surplus wealth by making a grant of four million dollars for the establishment of an accident and pension fund for the workmen who had ‘contributed so greatly’ to his success, and another of one million dollars for the maintenance of the libraries and other institutions which he had founded for his workers in and about Pittsburg.

Carnegie’s first gift of a library had been made to his native city in 1882, and one of the conditions attached to acceptance was that the local authority should adopt the Free Libraries (Scotland) Act (1867), and provide site and maintenance. On the plea that, when a library is supported financially by a community, ‘all taint of charity is dispelled’, Carnegie imposed a similar condition in connexion with most of the libraries which he endowed. In glancing over a newspaper immediately after he had founded the pension fund for his old workers he read: ‘The gods send thread for a web begun.’ The words sank into his heart, and his first ‘web’ thereafter took the form of five and a quarter million dollars for sixty-eight branch libraries in New York city. Between the date of the opening of the Dunfermline library and the year 1919, Carnegie and (after 1911) the Carnegie Corporation of New York made gifts amounting approximately to 60,600,000 dollars in order to endow libraries in the United States, the British Isles, Canada, and other countries. Of this sum about twelve million dollars were devoted to the endowment of 660 libraries in the British Isles.

Carnegie also made, among others, the following benefactions:

92