Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was a Scottish-born American industrialist who built the Carnegie Steel Company into the dominant force in American steel during the late nineteenth century, pioneering aggressive vertical integration and the Bessemer process to cut costs and undercut competitors. He sold his steel empire to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for roughly 480 million dollars, a transaction that formed the core of the new United States Steel Corporation, and spent much of his remaining two decades giving away the great majority of his fortune. His philanthropy funded more than 2,500 public libraries across the English-speaking world along with major grants to education, scientific research and international peace efforts, and his 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth" argued that the rich had a moral duty to distribute their fortunes for the public good during their own lifetimes, a document that shaped American philanthropy for generations after him.