Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-born industrialist, businessman, and a major philanthropist. He was an immigrant as a child with his parents. He built 's Carnegie Steel Company, which was later merged with Elbert H. Gary's Federal Steel Company and several smaller companies to create U.S. Steel. With the fortune he made from business, he turned to philanthropy and interests in education, founding the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While Carnegie paid his employees the low wages typical of the time, he later gave away most of his money to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in America, the United Kingdom and other countries, as well as a pension fund for former employees. He is often regarded as the second richest man in history. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and by the 1860s had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges and oil derricks. He built further wealth as a bond salesman raising money for American enterprise in Europe. Steel was where he made his fortune. In the 1870s, he founded the Carnegie Steel Company, a step which cemented his name as one of the “Captains of Industry”. By the 1890s, the company was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. Carnegie sold it to J.P. Morgan in 1901, who created US Steel. Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, and education and scientific research. Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive integrated iron and steel operations ever owned by an individual in the United States. One of his two great innovations was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel rails for railroad lines. The second was in his vertical integration of all suppliers of raw materials. In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig iron, steel rails, and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig metal per day. In 1888, Carnegie bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a 425-mile (685 km) long railway, and a line of lake steamships. Carnegie combined his assets and those of his associates in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company. By 1889, the U.S. output of steel exceeded that of the UK, and Carnegie owned a large part of it. Carnegie's empire grew to include the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works, (named for John Edgar Thomson, Carnegie's former boss and president of the ), Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill (Wilson, Walker & County), the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company, and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri (completed 1874). This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology, which marked the opening of a new steel market. In 1901, Carnegie was 66 years old and considering retirement. He reformed his enterprises into conventional joint stock corporations as preparation to this end. John Pierpont Morgan was a banker and perhaps America's most important financial deal maker. He had observed how efficiently Carnegie produced profit. He envisioned an integrated steel industry that would cut costs, lower prices to consumers and raise wages to workers. To this end, he needed to buy out Carnegie and several other major producers and integrate them into one company, thereby eliminating duplication and waste. He concluded negotiations on 2 March 1901, and formed the United States Steel Corporation. It was the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization in excess of $1 billion. Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to utilizing it on philanthropic projects. He had written about his views on social subjects and the responsibilities of great wealth in Triumphant Democracy (1886) and Gospel of Wealth (1889). Among his many philanthropic efforts, the establishment of public libraries throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries was especially prominent. Carnegie libraries, as they were commonly called, were built in many places. His method was to build and equip, but only on condition that the local authority matched that by providing a site and operating maintenance. To secure local interest, in 1885, he gave $500,000 to Pittsburgh for a public library, and in 1886, he gave $250,000 to Allegheny City for a music hall and library; and $250,000 to Edinburgh, Scotland, for a free library. In total Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, located in 47 states. Carnegie also built libraries in Canada and overseas in the United Kingdom including the Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and Fiji. He also donated £50,000 to help set up the University of Birmingham in 1899. The Broome County Public Library in New York opened in October 1904. Originally called the Binghamton Public Library, it was created with a gift of $75,000 from Andrew Carnegie. The building was designed to serve as both a public library and a community center. He gave $2 million in 1901 to start the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) at Pittsburgh, and the same amount in 1902 to found the Carnegie Institution at Washington, D.C. He later contributed more to these and other schools. CIT is now part of Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie served on the Board of Cornell University. His interest in music led him to fund construction of 7,000 church organs. He built and owned Carnegie Hall in .

Gustavus Swift

Gustavus Swift founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and even abroad, which ushered in the "era of cheap beef." Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products. Swift donated large sums of money to such institutions as the University of , the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). He established Northwestern University's "School of Oratory" in memory of his daughter, Annie May Swift, who died while attending the school. When he died in 1903, his company was valued at between US$125 million and $135 million, and had a workforce that was more than 21,000 strong. "The House of Swift" slaughtered as many as two million cattle, four million hogs, and two million sheep a year. Three years after his death, the value of the company's capital stock topped $250 million. He and his family are interred in a mausoleum in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois. Following the end of the American Civil War, Chicago emerged as a major railway center, making it an ideal point for the distribution of livestock raised on the Great Plains to Eastern markets. Getting the animals to market required herds to be driven distances of up to twelve hundred miles to railheads in Kansas City, MO, whereupon they were loaded into specialized stock cars and transported live (on the hoof) to regional processing centers. Driving cattle across the plains also led to tremendous weight loss, and a number of animals were typically lost along the way. Upon arrival at the local processing facility, livestock were either slaughtered by wholesalers and delivered fresh to nearby butcher shops for retail sale, smoked, or packed for shipment in barrels of salt. Certain costly inefficiencies were inherent in the process of transporting live animals by rail, particularly due to the fact that some sixty percent of the animal's mass is composed of inedible matter. Many animals weakened by the long drive died in transit, further increasing the per-unit shipping cost. Swift's ultimate solution to these problems was to devise a method to ship dressed meats from his packing plant in Chicago to the East. In 1878, Swift hired an engineer to design a refrigerated boxcar that was well- insulated, and positioned the ice in a compartment at the top of the car, allowing the chilled air to flow naturally downward. The design proved to be a practical solution to providing temperature-controlled carriage of dressed meats, and allowed Swift & Company to ship their products all over the United States, and even internationally, and in doing so radically altered the meat business. Swift's attempts to sell this design to the major railroads were unanimously rebuffed as the companies feared that they would jeopardize their considerable investments in stock cars and animal pens if refrigerated meat transport gained wide acceptance. In response, Swift financed the initial production run on his own, then — when the American roads refused his business — he contracted with the GTR (a railroad that derived little income from transporting live cattle). In 1880 the Swift Refrigerator Line (SRL) was created. Within a year the Line’s roster had risen to nearly 200 units, and Swift was transporting an average of 3,000 carcasses a week to Boston. Competing firms such as Armour and Company quickly followed suit. By 1920 the SRL owned and operated 7,000 of the ice-cooled rail cars. The General American Transportation Corporation would assume ownership of the line in 1930. “Everything but the Squeal” In response to public outcries to reduce the amount of pollutants generated by his packing plants, Swift sought innovative ways to use previously discarded portions of the animals his company butchered. This practice led to the wide scale commercial production of such diverse products as oleomargarine, soap, glue, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, knife handles, and pharmaceutical preparations such as pepsin and insulin. Low-grade meats were canned in products like pork and beans. The absence of federal inspection led to abuses. Sausages might incorporate rat droppings, dead rodents, or sawdust, and meat that had spoiled or meat mixed with waste materials was sometimes packed and sold (Swift once bragged that his slaughterhouses had become so sophisticated that they used "everything but the squeal"). Transgressions such as these were first documented in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, the publication of which shocked the nation and led to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The meat packing plants of Chicago were among the first to utilize assembly-line (or in this case, disassembly-line) production techniques. These practices symbolize the concept of "rationalized organization of work" to this day. Swift adapted the methods of the industrial revolution to meat packing operations, which resulted in huge efficiencies by allowing his plants to produce at a massive scale. The work was divided into myriad specific sub-tasks, which were carried out under the direction of supervisory personnel. Swift & Co. was broken down organizationally into various divisions, each one responsible for conducting a different aspect of the business of "bringing meat from the ranch to the consumer". By developing a vertically integrated company, Swift was able to control the sale of his meats from the slaughterhouse to the local butcher shop. The innovations that Swift championed not only revolutionized the meat packing industry, but also played a vital role in establishing the modern American business system, with an emphasis on mass production, functional specialization, managerial expertise, national distribution networks, and adaptation to technological innovation. Jay Gould

Jason "Jay" Gould was an American speculator who became one of the most important railroad leaders and stock traders of his day and was notorious for his lack of scruple. He was born Jason Gould in Roxbury, N. Y., on May 27, 1836, and grew up in poverty on his father's farm. With little education, he began work early as a clerk, a blacksmith, and then a surveyor. He started a tannery in Pennsylvania and for a few years was a leather merchant in New York City. Erie Railroad. Gould moved into railroad speculation, investing in small lines until 1867, when he became a director of the Erie Railroad, a major Eastern trunk line. Preferring to manipulate the securities of a firm from the inside, as part of its management, rather than ranging at large over the stock market, he joined Daniel Drew, the treasurer, and James Fisk, another director, in a scandalous operation in Erie stock. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad, wanted control of the Erie, and to prevent this the trio released on the market a total of 100,000 illegal new shares, half of them in defiance of a court injunction against the issue of new stock. Making millions on the transaction, they fled headquarters in New York City and went to Jersey City, N.J., with the corporate records and set up company offices there. Gould then bribed the New York legislators to authorize the new shares and forbid consolidation of the Erie with Vanderbilt's line. An agreement was reached with Vanderbilt in 1868, and Gould emerged in control as president, with Fisk a director and Drew retired. Joined on the board of directors by William Tweed, the head of the Tammany ring in New York City politics, Gould and Fisk speculated unscrupulously in Erie stock, selling large amounts of fraudulent shares without regard for sound management of the line. Gould also raided other stocks. He was particularly daring in his attempt to corner the gold market in September 1869. He failed, but the "Black Friday" panic of Sept. 24, 1869, that he caused aroused a public outcry and deepened popular hostility. In 1872 Gould was ousted from his position in the Erie. He left the railroad in chaotic condition. Having made a huge fortune, Gould turned to investing in Western railroads. About this time Russell Sage and Sidney Dillon became his close and permanent business associates. Through them and a group of lesser associates Gould stretched his own funds over many properties, often as minority holdings, and thus expanded his control. He began buying into the , became a director in 1874, and maintained predominant influence until 1884. The stock was cheap both because of the panic of 1873 and because of the poor condition of the line. In 1879 he sold most of his huge Union Pacific holdings after driving up the price by exuberant reports of its improved financial state, making an enormous profit. Gould reached the peak of his career in 1881, when he controlled more railroad mileage than any other individual or group of people. These holdings brought him into frequent rate wars with other railroad systems. His aggressive policy of reducing rates and building extensions of his lines disturbed the relative stability achieved by the railroad industry in the 1870s. His roads invaded territorial monopolies, and all efforts to end the devastating rate wars that reduced railroad revenues proved short-lived at best. Ironically, while public service was not his concern, it can be argued that Gould's rate cutting aided the shippers and paved the way for lower railroad costs and greater efficiency, since the lower rates were far-reaching and permanent. On the other hand, his lines were undermaintained and provided bad service. Nor did he introduce any new technical improvements. In the panic of 1884–1885 he lost heavily, and narrowly escaped bankruptcy. His railroad empire was reduced essentially to the Missouri Pacific system. In all, Gould was a masterful manager of speculative capital, endowed with a cold-blooded lack of scruple that enabled him to take full advantage of the underdeveloped state of corporation law and the low level of political morality in his time. He lived in luxury, with a yacht and an estate at Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y. A small, slight man, he was calm and soft-spoken. He died in New York City on Dec. 2, 1892, leaving a fortune estimated at $77 million mostly to his son George Jay Gould.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Jay Gould

John D. Rockefeller

John D. Rockefeller was an American industrialist and philanthropist. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of modern philanthropy. In 1870, he founded the Standard Oil Company and ran it until he officially retired in 1897. Rockefeller kept his stock and as gasoline grew in importance, his wealth soared and he became the world's richest man and first American billionaire, and is often regarded as the richest person in history. Standard Oil was convicted in Federal Court of monopolistic practices and broken up in 1911. Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy with foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education, and scientific research. His foundations pioneered the development of medical research, and were instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever. He is also the founder of both The University of Chicago and Rockefeller University. He was a devoted Northern Baptist and supported many church-based institutions throughout his life. Rockefeller adhered to total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco throughout his life.

Standard Oil In January 1870, Rockefeller formed Standard Oil of Ohio, which rapidly became the most profitable refiner in Cleveland. When it was found that at least part of Standard Oil's cost advantage came from secret rebates from the railroads bringing oil into Cleveland, the competing refiners insisted on getting similar rebates, and the railroads quickly complied. By then, however, Standard Oil had grown to become one of the largest shippers of oil and kerosene in the country. The railroads were fighting fiercely for traffic and, in an attempt to create a cartel to control freight rates, formed the South Improvement Company. Rockefeller agreed to support this cartel if they gave him preferential treatment as a high-volume shipper, which included not just steep rebates for his product, but also rebates for the shipment of competing products. Part of this scheme was the announcement of sharply increased freight charges. This touched off a firestorm of protest, which eventually led to the discovery of Standard Oil's part of the deal. Undeterred, Rockefeller continued with his self-reinforcing cycle of buying competing refiners, improving the efficiency of his operations, pressing for discounts on oil shipments, undercutting his competition, and buying them out. In less than two months in 1872, in what was later known as "The Cleveland Conquest", Standard Oil had absorbed 22 of its 26 Cleveland competitors. For many of his competitors, Rockefeller had merely to show them his books so they could see what they were up against, then make them a decent offer. If they refused his offer, he told them he would run them into bankruptcy, then cheaply buy up their assets at auction.

Monopoly Standard Oil gradually gained almost complete control of oil refining and marketing in the United States through horizontal integration. At that time, many legislatures had made it difficult to incorporate in one state and operate in another. As a result, Rockefeller and his associates owned separate corporations across dozens of states, making their management of the whole enterprise rather unwieldy. In 1882, Rockefeller's lawyers created an innovative form of corporation to centralize their holdings, giving birth to the Standard Oil Trust. The "trust" was a corporation of corporations, and the entity's size and wealth drew much attention. Despite improving the quality and availability of kerosene products while greatly reducing their cost to the public (the price of kerosene dropped by nearly 80% over the life of the company), Standard Oil's business practices created intense controversy. The firm was attacked by journalists and politicians throughout its existence, in part for its monopolistic practices, giving momentum to the anti-trust movement. One of the most effective attacks on Rockefeller and his firm was the 1904 publication of The History of the Standard Oil Company, by Ida Tarbell, a leading muckraker. Tarbell's father had been driven out of the oil business during the South Improvement Company affair. Although her work prompted a huge backlash against the company, Tarbell claims to have been surprised at its magnitude. In 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States found Standard Oil Company of in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and held that Standard Oil, which by then still had a 64% market share, originated in illegal monopoly practices and ordered it to be broken up into 34 new companies. Rockefeller, who had rarely sold shares, owned substantial stakes in all of them.

Philanthropy From his very first paycheck, Rockefeller tithed ten percent of his earnings to his church. As his wealth grew, so did his giving, primarily to educational and public health causes, but also for basic science and the arts. Philanthropy on a large scale was Rockefeller's second career, in which he came to be almost better known than in oil. Cynics have scoffed at his notion of religious stewardship, but Rockefeller deeply believed that he had a duty to transfer some of his huge fortune to humanitarian use rather than merely leave it to his heirs. He eventually devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to the improvement of American medical practice, education, and research. The Rockefeller Foundation was the chief vehicle for his philanthropy, but the General Education Board, devoted to improving the deplorable state of education in the South, and the University of Chicago also were major beneficiaries. Rockefeller embodied in one person most of the traditional traits of the Victorian businessman. Fully materialistic in his equating of business profit with its social significance, he nevertheless realized that wealth was no substitute for religious faith and personal virtue. Outliving by many years all of the men who once shared with him the epithet of "robber baron," he came in the end to be a spry old gentleman, whose habit of carrying a pocketful of shiny new dimes to present to small children was the delight of newspaper photographers everywhere. J.P. Morgan

John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier, banker and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1892 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thompson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company he merged the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses to form the United States Steel Corporation in 1901. He is widely credited with having saved or rescued the U.S. national economy in general—and the federal government in particular—on two separate occasions. He bequeathed much of his large art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and to the Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford, Connecticut. Morgan entered banking in 1857 at his father's London branch, moving to New York City the next year where he worked at a banking house. During the American Civil War, Morgan was approached to finance the purchase of antiquated rifles being sold by the army for $3.50 each. Morgan's partner re-machined them and sold the rifles back to the army for $22 each. While it became a scandal, the military knew it was buying back its own guns and Morgan never even saw the guns, acting only as a lender. Morgan himself, like many wealthy persons, avoided military service by paying $1000 for a substitute. Morgan's ascent to power was accompanied by dramatic financial battles. He wrestled control of the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad from Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in 1869. He led the syndicate that broke the government-financing privileges of Jay Cooke, and soon became deeply involved in developing and financing a railroad empire by reorganizations and consolidations in all parts of the United States. He raised large sums in Europe, but instead of only handling the funds, he helped the railroads reorganize and achieve greater efficiencies. He fought against the speculators interested only in profits, and built a vision of an integrated transportation system. Morgan's process of taking over troubled businesses to reorganize them was known as "Morganization". Morgan reorganized business structures and management in order to return them to profitability. His reputation as a banker and financier also helped bring interest from investors to the businesses he took over. After Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, Morgan set up conferences in 1889 and 1890 that brought together railroad presidents in order to help the industry follow the new laws and write agreements for the maintenance of "public, reasonable, uniform and stable rates." The conferences were the first of their kind, and by creating a community of interest among competing lines paved the way for the great consolidations of the early 20th century. In 1895, at the depths of the Panic of 1893, the Federal Treasury was nearly out of gold. President Grover Cleveland arranged for Morgan to create a private syndicate on Wall Street to supply the U.S. Treasury with $65 million in gold, half of it from Europe, to float a bond issue that restored the treasury surplus of $100 million. U.S. Steel aimed to achieve greater economies of scale, reduce transportation and resource costs, expand product lines, and improve distribution. It was also planned to allow the United States to compete globally with Britain and Germany. U.S. Steel's size was claimed by Schwab and others to allow the company to pursue distant international markets-globalization. U.S. Steel was regarded as a monopoly by critics, as the business was attempting to dominate not only steel but also the construction of bridges, ships, railroad cars and rails, wire, nails, and a host of other products. With U.S. Steel, Morgan had captured two-thirds of the steel market, and Schwab was confident that the company would soon hold a 75 percent market share. However, after 1901 the businesses' market share dropped; Schwab, himself, played an important role in falsifying his own prediction: finding the new company unwieldy, Schwab resigned from U.S. Steel in 1903 to form Bethlehem Steel, which became the second largest U.S. producer. Enemies of banking attacked Morgan for the terms of his loan of gold to the federal government in the 1895 crisis, for his financial resolution of the Panic of 1907, and for bringing on the financial ills of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. In December 1912, Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. The committee ultimately found that a cabal of financial leaders were abusing their public trust to consolidate control over many industries: the partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. along with the directors of First National and National City Bank controlled aggregate resources of $22.245 billion. Morgan was a notable collector of books, pictures, and other art objects, many loaned or given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (of which he was president and was a major force in its establishment), and many housed in his London house and in his private library. His son, J. P. Morgan, Jr., made the Pierpont Morgan Library a public institution in 1924 as a memorial to his father.