Giants of Enterprise

Chapter One

Andrew Carnegie

From Rags to Richest

You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer a dollar & a half to buy a hymn book with? God will bless you. I feel it. I know it.... P.S. Don't send the hymn-book, send the money. I want to make the selection myself.

Money

Sometime between 1886 and the turn of the century, Andrew Carnegie was visiting his widowed sister-in-law Lucy at the estate his late brother had bought in Dungeness, Florida, just off the coast of the border between Florida and Georgia. Andrew and Lucy got along well. He had named his first blast furnace for the production of pig iron after her (it was the custom in the iron trade to name furnaces after women); and she had named one of her sons (she and Tom were the parents of nine children) Andrew.

During this visit, Lucy was complaining to her bemused brotherin-law that her son Andrew neglected to write her from the college which he was attending. Without missing a beat, Carnegie told her that he could induce a response from the young collegian by retur ... read full excerpt from Giants of Enterprise ebook