Born in 1835 to poor parents in Scotland, Andrew Carnegie became the richest man of his age. His family migrated to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1848, and he immediately started work, at age 13, in a textile mill, earning $1.20 a week. By dint of hard work he became a great and astute industrialist, a doyen of the steel industry that he launched in Pittsburgh in 1873. It was Carnegie who said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.”

In 1901, at age 65, he sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J. P. Morgan for the astronomical sum of $480 million, and devoted the rest of his life to philanthropic activities and writing.

Carnegie believed that the rich had a moral obligation to give away their fortunes. In 1889 he wrote The Gospel of Wealth, in which he proclaimed:
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: first, to set an example of modest unostentatious living, shunning display; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds which he is strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.

Carnegie set about disposing of his fortune through innumerable personal gifts and through the establishment of various trusts. In his thirties, he had already begun to give away some of his fast-accumulating funds. His first large gifts were made to his native town, but he later created seven philanthropic and educational organisations in the United States, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and several more in Europe.

One of Carnegie’s life-long interests was the establishment of free public libraries to make available to everyone a means of self-education. When he was a poor young man in Allegheny, he lived near Colonel James Anderson, a wealthy individual who allowed any working boy the free use of his personal library. In those days, America did not have a system of free public libraries. Carnegie never forgot Anderson’s generosity and attributed much of his own success to the enlightenment he obtained from Anderson’s books. He remained convinced of, and committed to, the notion that education was the key to success in life. “Knowledge is power” was his dictum.

There were only a few public libraries in the world when, in 1879, Carnegie began to promote his idea of free public libraries. By giving a community a library, he felt that all might educate themselves as he had done. He and his corporation subsequently spent $56 million to build 2509 libraries throughout the English-speaking world. Although the programme ended in 1917, for the next 40 years the corporation maintained an interest in the improvement of library services. Other major programmes in the corporation’s early history concerned adult education and education in the fine arts.

World peace was another cause Carnegie believed in. He established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and funded the building of the Peace Palace in The Hague, in the Netherlands, which houses the International Court of Justice.

By the time of his death in Massachusetts in 1919, Carnegie had given away $350 million. After his death, a final $30 million was donated to foundations, charities and pensioners. He indeed lived by his adage “A man who dies rich dies in disgrace.”

Carnegie’s philanthropy brought him his share of critics. Many considered him little more than a self-indulgent egotist delighting in the attention his generosity won him—as well as in having thousands of buildings named after him. However, Carnegie never required his name on a building, although he didn’t discourage it and would provide an oil painting of himself on request to hang inside the main door. But regardless of any question of self-aggrandisement, Carnegie was driven by the courage of his convictions to do what he believed was morally right.