Comparing The Industrial Revolution And The Gilded Age

Revolution, by its very definition, represents change. Change is an inevitable, unstoppable side-effect of the passage of time and human innovation. In the 18th and 19th century, it was this innovation and ingenuity that fueled the fire of the Industrial Revolution in America. Great men, immigrants and Americans alike, created a golden age of technology and industry, thrusting the country onto the world stage of business, economics, and politics. America was no longer sustained by agriculture and the farmer, but by the never tiring steam engines, machines, and the cheap labor of immigrant workers. The Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age created an economy centered around business and technology and redefined the culture of the United States

This era shaped a new breed of men, leaders and entrepreneurs, who risked it all in search of fame and wealth and in the process lead the country into a new age of business. No man had a greater impact on this era than Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie was born in the year 1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland. At the age of thirteen, Carnegie and his family moved to America in search of economic opportunity. Carnegie immediately found employment and held a wide array of jobs until becoming a railroad division superintendent in 1858. While holding this position, he invested in coal, iron, oil, and railroad companies, allowing him to become a wealth man by the time he was in his thirties. In 1870, Carnegie entered the steel business and over the next few decades he would build up the Carnegie Steel Company. His business model was centered around self-reliance from the mining of resources to the transportation of the finished steel. Pictures taken of Carnegie's factories in the year 1900 show his system of transportation, a railroad running through the factory capable of transporting Carnegie steel to market (Carnegie Steel Company 1900). In the year 1901, Carnegie sold his business to J.P. Morgan for more than four hundred and eighty million dollars, making him the richest man of his day ("Andrew Carnegie"). As Carnegie retired, he turned toward philanthropy, giving away more than three hundred and fifty million dollars. His donations would lead to the construction of Vanderbilt Hall in New York City, the erection of libraries, and the foundation of hundreds of institution, dedicated to research in science and mathematics (Reams, Patrick, and David). In the year 1899, Carnegie had published a paper known as "The Gospel of Wealth." In it he outlined the duty of the wealthy to use their privilege to shape a