Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was a Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist. Brought to Pennsylvania as a boy by his impoverished weaver father, he worked in a cotton mill and a telegraph office, rose through the Pennsylvania Railroad, and built the steel business that he sold to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for a sum that made him the richest man in the world. He then gave most of it away, founding some 2,500 public libraries, the Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Hall and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His essay The Gospel of Wealth argued that the rich are trustees for the public, and his Autobiography appeared the year after his death.