POVERTY TO RICHES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22320, 18 January 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

POVERTY TO RICHES

£70,000,000 GIVEN AWAY LIFE OF ANDREW CARNEGIE SCOTLAND'S CELEBRATED SON GREAT BENEFACTOR'S CREED The bed was a bunk in the wall. Tho home was a one-room attic. There was no midwife. A neighbour helped. The baby—a boy—was born. That birth took place 100 years ago in Dunfermline. And that boy with the golden hair was Andrew Carnegie, writes C. A. Lyon in the Sunday Express. Andrew Carnegie left tho povertystricken Scottish home to earn £IO,OOO a year at twenty-seven. Wrote the plan of his life'on a little bit of paper half a century and more before he died and hid it from the eyes of the world until they found after his death that he had realised it all, and became the richest man in the world and was yet truly happy. Andrew Carnegie's father was an oldfashioned hand weaver, and he touched the depths of suffering in the formative years of his .son's life. It was the hungry forties. Dunfermline itself could not afford to light its streets. "Andra," said Carnegie senior to his son one day, "I can get nae mair work." So the family loom was sold to buy bread. Emigration seemed the only way out, and so, in 184S, young Andrew set sail with his parents across the Atlantic. The family settled near Pittsburg. Employment in New Land

The future "happy millionaire" found filthy employment tending a boiler and dipping spinning bobbins in a vjifc of oil, which made him sick. Delivery frora tlus 'came in .tho shape of a telegraph nicv-sohger boy's job. He lay in bed at. night with his eye? shut reciting, not his prayers, but the names of the inhabitants of Pittsburg streets, beginning st the bottom and finishing at the ten Arjd. as he named the inhabitants be would make a mental picture even of their faces that he might deliver messages more quickly if he encountered them-in the street.

These feats could not long pass unnoticed, and when he began to come to the office before the proper hour to learn the 'Morse alphabet, his promotion to an operator became certain. Carnegie never regretted being a telegraph messenger. He said this was the turning point of his life because it brought him into contact with important men, a thing he regarded as a great part of success. Railway Telegraphist In 1853 he joined the Pennsylvania Kailroad as a telegraphist, and there he showed some universal qualities that make men rich. He was a stripling of 18, but he felt he could accomplish all. The train hands were a free living, undisciplined crew of ex-sailors and disappointed gold seekers, new immigrants 'and similar rovsterers. But when' one day he was left alone in the office in the face of a breakdown on the line he controlled all these ruffians, without authority, by sending out sheafs of telegrams in his superior's name. Dismissal loomed up in front of his eyes. Instead, he sorted out the chaos and was running every 'train in the division by the time his superior arrived. Soon after that he was given a division of his own to run. In this post he met a man with a little green bag who laid for him the foundation of his fortune. They were in the train together when the man took from his bag a model of a- sleeping car, the first in America. Andrew acquired the car for his company, and the shares " the graceful inventor made over to him were yielding him £IOOO a year by the time he was 24. tlnvestments and Income From this nest-egg and from savings from his salary he invested and reinvested. By the time he was 27 his investments .were yielding him nearly £IO,OOO, a year. He left the railroad when 30, and he still did not know what to do with his life. He organised - a company for building railway bridges and another for making iron rails, and a locomotive works. He organised them and he put able men in to run them, and he drew the profits —that was his gift. What makes Carnegie unique among millionaires? Iron-making seemed to him to be' only a sideline in life, and ho soon after went off to Europe and was climbing into volcanoes, attending opera?, and wandering through France while his lieutenants ran the works. From this time on he made a practice of npending six months of the year on holidays. He was settling down to he s prosperous easy-going business - man and vthen-rflaah, Carnegie's career '■ and the course of America were altered ra oae momentous encounter. Meeting With Inventor Coming ' over in the boat he met Henry Bessemer, inventor of a cheap method of making steel. Until then steel had been as one of the precious metals. Carnegie saw all that steel was to mean in a vision of the America to come—the great prairie, then called "the American Desert,''* bridged and peopled by 'cheap steel railway lines, bridges, tools —everything of the wonderful new metal. Carnegie's steel vision was akin to a religious conversion. His mind went on wings through the plans he would now create. It seemed that up to that time all his life had been wasted, and at last he had a purpose—the manufacture of the new steel. He hurried back to America and summoned his old partners. They must start a steel plant immediately. He failed to electrify them. He started his plant with a new set of partners 12 miles from Pittsburg. While it was still building the colossal financial crash of 1873 seemed to threaten the nation's existence, but Carnegie continued to pour every dollar he had into his steel works with fanatical zeal. He sold his other possessions and invested them in the seemingly doomed enterprise. He opened his works . in 1875. The First Skyscraper Other ojd-established iron companies were beginning to make rails, but he undersold them. Carnegie steei conquered. And what a revolution it brought. Cowboys began to enclose their herds with steel-barbed wire. The ships of the American Navy were for the first time built of steel.. American steel tools flooded the market of the world, iron bridges were supplanted by steel bridges. Most significant of all, tho first [American skyscraper—parent of a mon- |

strous brood —was built at Chicago with a frame from the Carnegie steelworks. All the rich proceeds of these developments were shared between Carnegie and a few other steel manufacturers.

But during these momentous developments Carnegie was not at his office desk. Ho had gone off to Europe again on pleasure. His income now £370,000, seemingly earned for him by his lieutenants, followed him. "Enjoy life" was still his motto.

At the height of his success, when he had become the richest man in all America, he galvanised the world by publishing a pamphlet in which he said it was a disgrace for a rich man to die rich. Here, indeed, was a new kind of millionaire, and many laughed at him, but he answered, "Wait and see."

Eight more years and Carnegie retired. Ho wrote down the price he wanted for his business on a piece of paper. The paper was taken to J. Pierpont Morgan. He said, "I accept." The prico was £80,000,000. It was the greatest commercial deal in the world, and made Carnegie the Avorld's richest mftn.

His dread of dying rich asserted itself. He began giving away his money. Organs, the music of which ho was inordinately fond, were a favourite object of benefaction. Swedenborgians, Jews, Nonconformists received them, to the number of 8000 in all. He built 2811 libraries, and they cost £12,000,000. His greatest gift to his native land was the Carnegie Trust for the universities of Scotland.

Then, in 1919, he died, aged 84. There was never a man's death that was awaited with more curiosity. Had ho really died poor, as he said he ought to? They waded eagerly through the will, past the £2OOO a year for Lloyd George, past the £IOOO a year for John ]3urns, past the comfortable provisions for his wife and daughter. And when they came to the end they found that he really had in his lifetime given away more than 90 per cent of his millions. He had given away more than £70,000.000.