By 1900, Carnegie’s company was producing one quarter of the nation’s Bessemer steel.īy 1900, Carnegie was ready to sell his steel holdings. However, he disliked monopolistic trusts, and so built his organization into a partnership that included about 40 Pittsburgh millionaires. Contrary to most, he used times of recession to expand his business, slowly buying out all of his competitors. His goals were to improve efficiency, increase quality, and decrease costs by controlling all of the variables in the production process.Ĭarnegie was a skilled businessman and salesman, and he had a talent for hiring men with the greatest expertise. He acquired coal properties, iron ore from Lake Superior, a fleet of steamships to transport materials across the Great Lakes, and railroads that delivered the materials to the furnaces in Pittsburgh. Recognizing this, Carnegie employed a tactic known as “vertical integration,” where he integrated every phase of the steel-making business. Edgar Thompson Steel Works, which was named after the president of his biggest customer, Pennsylvania Railroad.Īmerica was one of the few places where all of the components needed to make steel were available in fairly close proximity. This inspired Carnegie to focus his business efforts on steel, and in 1875 he launched J. To this point, steel was a scarce commodity in America, but with the Bessemer process steel could be inexpensively and easily produced for locomotives, rails, and the girders used in building construction. During a trip to Europe in 1872 he met Sir Henry Bessemer, who in 1856 had invented a new process of turning iron into steel. Carnegie eventually worked his way to the top through a number of jobs in various industries. In 1848, as a young boy, Carnegie migrated with his family from Scotland to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. One of the greatest of these “Captains of Commerce” stands out for his achievements and his contributions-Andrew Carnegie. The resulting expansion in industry went hand-in-hand with industrial combination and concentration, enabling a few business leaders to dominate the largest markets of the time. Entrepreneurs quickly developed systems of mass production and distribution to meet growing national needs. The small businesses that supported the pre-Civil War economy could not satisfy the rapidly growing national markets. Hippocampus United States History: Entrepreneurs