Beginning a New Era of Steel
Angela Chen
Carnegie was not in the United States until 1848; he worked at his father’s loom factory in Scotland. He did not have a good paycheck for this job, and his family was in poverty. When he went to Britain, he met many steelmakers.
Carnegie has also recruited others to work for him, including his own brother, Thomas M. Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie knew that there would be a future demand for iron and steel, so he left the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865. When he was around 38 years old, he began focusing in the steel industry near the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works.
After this success, he is still including many innovations such as detailed cost and production accounting that is allowing the company to achieve greater efficiencies than any other manufacturing industry. Any technological advances that were able to lessen the cost of creating steel were used, and in the 1890s, Carnegie’s mills introduced the basic open-hearth furnace into the American steel industry. Carnegie also achieved more efficiency by purchasing iron-ore deposits that held the raw materials of steelmaking, as well as the ships and railroads that transported these supplies to the mills. This vertical integration was very important for Andrew Carnegie in building his company’s large empire.