The King of Steel Dies

Andrew Carnegie died 11 August 1919

Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland. His family moved to Pittsburgh in 1848. It was there at the age of 14 that he became a telegrapher for the Pittsburgh Telegraph Office. While working there he came to the attention of Thomas A. Scott, the Superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Carnegie was appointed by Scott to Assistant Secretary of War to Superintendent of the Military Railways and the Union Government's telegraph lines in the East. Andrew Carnegie helped open the rail lines into Washington and rode the locomotive which pulled the first brigade of Union troops into Washington. Under Carnegie’s organization, the telegraph was extended, becoming efficiently useful to the Union cause. He would later boast that he was "the first casualty of the war" when he gained a scar on his cheek from working with telegraph wire. During the Civil War, Carnegie invested $40,000 in oil in Venango Co,PA . Carnegie stayed off the battlefield during the war by paying his cousin Dale Carnegie $850 to serve in his stead.

When the war ended he left the Pennsylvania Railroad to devote his attention to the manufacture of steel. By the 1880s, he was America's king of steel.

For more information see these web sites
http://www.answers.com/topic/andrew-carnegie
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAcarnegie.htm
http://heros4u.com/americanbusinessmen/andrew_carnegie___civil_war.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/peopleevents/pande01.html