Rockefeller As A Captain Of Industry

Three captains of industry in the late 19th century were Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. These business-savvy, innovative young men constructed a vision for a modern America and transformed their empires and industries in oil, rail, steel, and shipping. All three men accumulated immense fortunes and helped the United States become an industrial and economic power.

All of them began working at a young age. Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt started working at age 11, after quitting school. He was a deck hand on his father’s ferry boat on the Hudson River. With the profits he made from his boat business, be began to invest in railroads. At the age of 16 Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service. He

He eventually worked his way to the top through a number of jobs in various industries. His first job, at age 13 in 1848, was as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a Pittsburgh cotton factory at $1.20 per week. In 1850, he became a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh Office of the Ohio Telegraph Company and by the 1860s (approximately age 25) had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges and oil derricks.

Rockefeller was already a successful businessman as a teenager. He recognized potential profits in refining oil. He arose from a position of bookkeeper to create the Standard Oil Company in 1870, at approximately age 30. Standard Oil gradually gained control of all oil production in America. In 1877, Rockefeller controlled 95 percent of the oil refineries in the United States and monopolized virtually the entire world petroleum market. As kerosene and gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller’s wealth soared and he became the world’s richest man and the first American worth more than a billion

They had the ability to imagine the future and see how they can benefit within it. Long before Cornelius become known for his railroad empire, he was a major player in the steamships industry. In the 1860s, Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidated 13 separate railroads creating the New York Central Railroad System.

After the war, Andrew Carnegie left the railroads to devote all his energies to the ironworks trade. He was a Scottish-American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century, where he made his fortune. His federal steel company became the core of the United States Steel Corporation. At the height of his career, Carnegie was the second-richest person in the world, behind only John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil.

Rockefeller had a long and controversial career in the oil industry. In the 1890s, Rockefeller expanded into iron ore and ore transportation, forcing a collision with steel magnate Andrew