Andrew Carnegie was born
into a poor family of weavers in a small town in Scotland, in 1835. After
emigrating with his family to America in 1848, he started his first job at the
age of only thirteen, working in a cotton mill as a 'bobbin boy', his task
being to change the spools of thread on the machines. For this, he earned
one dollar twenty a week.
Despite his poor beginnings, a little over fifty
years later, Carnegie would retire from business as the second richest man in
the world, and spend the rest of his life as a philanthropist, helping those
less fortunate than himself. By the time of the American Civil War in
1861, Carnegie had been a telegraph operator and a railroad worker.
Realizing that the
future of the world was in iron and steel, he began investing in these
industries, combining an instinctive business skill with a self taught
education to become extremely successful. In fact, by the late 1880s,
Carnegie was the biggest single manufacturer of iron and steel in the whole
world, and well on the way to becoming a multimillionaire. However, as
Carnegie wrote in a number of different essays and publications, money was not
the only motivating factor in his life.
CARNEGIE:
"I propose to take
an income no greater than fifty thousand dollars per annum! " Beyond
this I need ever earn but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes! Let
us cast aside business forever, except for others.
In other words, Carnegie
didn't believe that his only role in life was to make money, but that, after
becoming rich, his money should be used to help other people. In 1901,
Carnegie was bought out by another steel company and netted over two hundred
million US dollars from the deal. Deciding there and then to retire, he
embarked on a philanthropic journey which saw him donate hundreds of millions
of dollars to build libraries, swimming pools, university institutions and
concert halls in America, Canada and the UK. Perhaps due to his own desire
for books and learning when he was young and poor, he devoted a lot of his time
and money to children and their education. However, as with all famous
philanthropists, no matter how much money Carnegie donated, it did not change
the fact that the life he was living was like night and day compared to that of
the poor people of the world.
This, to me, is the
fascinating, and controversial, thing about philanthropists. The question
always remains: are these rich and famous people donating their millions simply
to help the poor, sick and hungry of the world, or do they in fact feel guilty
for the huge amount of wealth they've got, compared to those less fortunate
than themselves? When Andrew Carnegie died of pneumonia 1919 at the age of 84,
his estate was estimated to be worth in the region of five hundred million US
dollars, and his philanthropic donations up till his death totaled an amazing
359,695,650 dollars: an incredible achievement.