How Did Andrew Carnegie Contribute To Charity

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Andrew Carnegie "In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves" - Andrew Carnegie (Encyclopedia.com). Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist (Wikipedia). Carnegie led the expansion of the American Steel Industry in the late 19th Century, becoming one of the wealthiest Americans in History (Wikipedia). Carnegie gave away around 350 million dollars in the last eighteen years of his life, around ninety percent of his fortune (Wikipedia). Carnegie was born on November 25, 1835, in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland (Biography.com). He had very little formal education, but his family believed in the importance of books and education (Biography.com). Carnegie was the son of …show more content…

When Carnegie was 12, his father had trouble at work, and the country faced starvation (Wikipedia). They were struggling very severely, so they had to borrow money from George Lauder, Sr, and they moved to Allegheny, Pennsylvania when he was only 13 (Biography.com & Wikipedia). Carnegie secured a job in a factory for $1.20 ($47.14) a week; the following year, he got a job as a telegraph messenger (Wikipedia). Carnegie wanted to advance his career, becoming a telegraph operator in 1851 (Biography.com). Shortly after, he secured a job at the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1853 for $4 a week ($161.21), and his job was assistant and telegrapher (Biography.com). Three years later, he was promoted to superintendent and made way more money than before, and he was only twenty-three years old (Biography.com)! Carnegie invested in the oil industry and made substantial returns (Biography.com). In 1865, he left the railroad industry to tend to his other business interests, including The Keystone Bridge Company (Biography.com). In the next decade, his primary focus was the steel industry, and he called his company Carnegie Steel