Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
ourselves from all responsibility upon the bond by placing the
superstructure on the banks awaiting the completion of the
substructure which he was still building.
Mr. Garrett was very proud of his Scottish blood, and Burns having
been once touched upon between us we became firm friends. He
afterwards took me to his fine mansion in the country. He was one of
the few Americans who then lived in the grand style of a country
gentleman, with many hundreds of acres of beautiful land, park-like
drives, a stud of thoroughbred horses, with cattle, sheep, and dogs,
and a home that realized what one had read of the country life of a
nobleman in England.
At a later date he had fully determined that his railroad company
should engage in the manufacture of steel rails and had applied for
the right to use the Bessemer patents. This was a matter of great
moment to us. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company was one of our
best customers, and we were naturally anxious to prevent the building
of steel-rail rolling mills at Cumberland. It would have been a losing
enterprise for the Baltimore and Ohio, for I was sure it could buy its
steel rails at a much cheaper rate than it could possibly make the
small quantity needed for itself. I visited Mr. Garrett to talk the
matter over with him. He was then much pleased with the foreign
commerce and the lines of steamships which made Baltimore their port.
He drove me, accompanied by several of his staff, to the wharves where
he was to decide about their extension, and as the foreign goods were
being discharged from the steamship side and placed in the railway
cars, he turned to me and said:
"Mr. Carnegie, you can now begin to appreciate the magnitude of our
vast system and understand why it is necessary that we should make
everything for ourselves, even our steel rails. We cannot depend upon
private concerns to supply us with any of the principal articles we
consume. We shall be a world to ourselves."
"Well," I said, "Mr. Garrett, it is all very grand, but really your
'vast system' does not overwhelm me. I read your last annual report
and saw that you collected last year for transporting the goods of
others the sum of fourteen millions of dollars. The firms I control
dug the material from the hills, made their own goods, and sold them
to a much greater value than that. You are really a very small concern
compared with Carnegie Brothers and Company."
My railroad apprenticeship came in there to advantage. We heard no
more of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company entering into
competition with us. Mr. Garrett and I remained good friends to the
end. He even presented me with a Scotch collie dog of his own rearing.
That I had been a Pennsylvania Railroad man was drowned in the "wee
drap o' Scotch bluid atween us."
CHAPTER X
THE IRON WORKS
The Keystone Works have always been my pet as being the parent of all
the other works. But they had not been long in existence before the
advantage of wrought- over cast-iron became manifest. Accordingly, to
insure uniform quality, and also to make certain shapes which were not
then to be obtained, we determined to embark in the manufacture of
iron. My brother and I became interested with Thomas N. Miller, Henry
Phipps, and Andrew Kloman in a small iron mill. Miller was the first
to embark with Kloman and he brought Phipps in, lending him eight
hundred dollars to buy a one-sixth interest, in November, 1861.
I must not fail to record that Mr. Miller was the pioneer of our iron
manufacturing projects. We were all indebted to Tom, who still lives
(July 20, 1911) and sheds upon us the sweetness and light of a most
lovable nature, a friend who grows more precious as the years roll by.
He has softened by age, and even his outbursts against theology as
antagonistic to true religion are in his fine old age much less
alarming. We are all prone to grow philosophic in age, and perhaps
this is well. [In re-reading this--July 19, 1912--in our retreat upon
the high moors at Aultnagar, I drop a tear for my bosom friend, dear
Tom Miller, who died in Pittsburgh last winter. Mrs. Carnegie and I
attended his funeral. Henceforth life lacks something, lacks much--my
first partner in early years, my dearest friend in old age. May I go
where he is, wherever that may be.]
Andrew Kloman had a small steel-hammer in Allegheny City. As a
superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad I had found that he made
the best axles. He was a great mechanic--one who had discovered, what
was then unknown in Pittsburgh, that whatever was worth doing with
machinery was worth doing well. His German mind made him thorough.
What he constructed cost enormously, but when once started it did the
work it was intended to do from year's end to year's end. In those
early days it was a question with axles generally whether they would
run any specified time or break. There was no analysis of material, no
scientific treatment of it.
How much this German created! He was the first man to introduce the
cold saw that cut cold iron the exact lengths. He invented upsetting
machines to make bridge links, and also built the first "universal"
mill in America. All these were erected at our works. When Captain
Eads could not obtain the couplings for the St. Louis Bridge arches
(the contractors failing to make them) and matters were at a
standstill, Kloman told us that he could make them and why the others
had failed. He succeeded in making them. Up to that date they were the
largest semicircles that had ever been rolled. Our confidence in Mr.
Kloman may be judged from the fact that when he said he could make
them we unhesitatingly contracted to furnish them.
I have already spoken of the intimacy between our family and that of
the Phippses. In the early days my chief companion was the elder
brother, John. Henry was several years my junior, but had not failed
to attract my attention as a bright, clever lad. One day he asked his
brother John to lend him a quarter of a dollar. John saw that he had
important use for it and handed him the shining quarter without
inquiry. Next morning an advertisement appeared in the "Pittsburgh
Dispatch":
"A willing boy wishes work."
This was the use the energetic and willing Harry had made of his
quarter, probably the first quarter he had ever spent at one time in
his life. A response came from the well-known firm of Dilworth and
Bidwell. They asked the "willing boy" to call. Harry went and obtained
a position as errand boy, and as was then the custom, his first duty
every morning was to sweep the office. He went to his parents and
obtained their consent, and in this way the young lad launched himself
upon the sea of business. There was no holding back a boy like that.
It was the old story. He soon became indispensable to his employers,
obtained a small interest in a collateral branch of their business;
and then, ever on the alert, it was not many years before he attracted
the attention of Mr. Miller, who made a small investment for him with
Andrew Kloman. That finally resulted in the building of the iron mill
in Twenty-Ninth Street. He had been a schoolmate and great crony of my
brother Tom. As children they had played together, and throughout
life, until my brother's death in 1886, these two formed, as it were,
a partnership within a partnership. They invariably held equal
interests in the various firms with which they were connected. What
one did the other did.
The errand boy is now one of the richest men in the United States and
has begun to prove that he knows how to expend his surplus. Years ago
he gave beautiful conservatories to the public parks of Allegheny and
Pittsburgh. That he specified "that these should be open upon Sunday"
shows that he is a man of his time. This clause in the gift created
much excitement. Ministers denounced him from the pulpit and
assemblies of the church passed resolutions declaring against the
desecration of the Lord's Day. But the people rose, _en masse_,
against this narrow-minded contention and the Council of the city
accepted the gift with acclamation. The sound common sense of my
partner was well expressed when he said in reply to a remonstrance by
ministers:
"It is all very well for you, gentlemen, who work one day in the week
and are masters of your time the other six during which you can view
the beauties of Nature--all very well for you--but I think it shameful
that you should endeavor to shut out from the toiling masses all that
is calculated to entertain and instruct them during the only day which
you well know they have at their disposal."
These same ministers have recently been quarreling in their convention
at Pittsburgh upon the subject of instrumental music in churches. But
while they are debating whether it is right to have organs in
churches, intelligent people are opening museums, conservatories, and
libraries upon the Sabbath; and unless the pulpit soon learns how to
meet the real wants of the people in this life (where alone men's
duties lie) much better than it is doing at present, these rival
claimants for popular favor may soon empty their churches.
Unfortunately Kloman and Phipps soon differed with Miller about the
business and forced him out. Being convinced that Miller was unfairly
treated, I united with him in building new works. These were the
Cyclops Mills of 1864. After they were set running it became possible,
and therefore advisable, to unite the old and the new works, and the
Union Iron Mills were formed by their consolidation in 1867. I did
not believe that Mr. Miller's reluctance to associate again with his
former partners, Phipps and Kloman, could not be overcome, because
they would not control the Union Works. Mr. Miller, my brother, and I
would hold the controlling interest. But Mr. Miller proved obdurate
and begged me to buy his interest, which I reluctantly did after all
efforts had failed to induce him to let bygones be bygones. He was
Irish, and the Irish blood when aroused is uncontrollable. Mr. Miller
has since regretted (to me) his refusal of my earnest request, which
would have enabled the pioneer of all of us to reap what was only his
rightful reward--millionairedom for himself and his followers.
We were young in manufacturing then and obtained for the Cyclops Mills
what was considered at the time an enormous extent of land--seven
acres. For some years we offered to lease a portion of the ground to
others. It soon became a question whether we could continue the
manufacture of iron within so small an area. Mr. Kloman succeeded in
making iron beams and for many years our mill was far in advance of
any other in that respect. We began at the new mill by making all
shapes which were required, and especially such as no other concern
would undertake, depending upon an increasing demand in our growing
country for things that were only rarely needed at first. What others
could not or would not do we would attempt, and this was a rule of our
business which was strictly adhered to. Also we would make nothing
except of excellent quality. We always accommodated our customers,
even although at some expense to ourselves, and in cases of dispute we
gave the other party the benefit of the doubt and settled. These were
our rules. We had no lawsuits.
As I became acquainted with the manufacture of iron I was greatly
surprised to find that the cost of each of the various processes was
unknown. Inquiries made of the leading manufacturers of Pittsburgh
proved this. It was a lump business, and until stock was taken and the
books balanced at the end of the year, the manufacturers were in total
ignorance of results. I heard of men who thought their business at the
end of the year would show a loss and had found a profit, and