Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 39, 2007

Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist, businessman, a major philanthropist, and the founder of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company which later became U.S. Steel.

Carnegie is known for having built one of the most powerful and influential corporations in United States history, and, later in his life, giving away most of his riches to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in America, Scotland and other countries throughout the world. Carnegie, a poor boy with fierce ambition, a pleasant personality, and a devotion to both hard work and self-improvement, started as a telegrapher. By the 1860s, he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, as well as bridges and oil derricks, and he built wealth as a bond salesman raising money in Europe for American enterprises.

Steel was where he found his fortune. In the 1870s, he founded the Carnegie Steel Company, a step which cemented his name as one of the “Captains of Industry”. By the 1890s, the company was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. He sold it to J.P. Morgan's US Steel in 1901 and devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, and scientific research.