The Gospel of Wealth

Carnegie opens his story with an admission most self-made men would bury: he never wanted to be a businessman. "I should never have selected a business career if I had been permitted to choose." The career chose him.

His father was a master weaver in Dunfermline, Scotland, with four damask looms and apprentices of his own. Then the steam factories came, and hand weaving died. One day the father carried his last finished cloth to the merchant and came home with no more work to do. The boy was about ten, and he resolved that the wolf of poverty would be driven from their door.

So the family sold the looms and sailed for Pittsburgh. The question from then on was plain: "What I could get to do, not what I desired."

The first rung was a cotton factory. At twelve Carnegie became a bobbin boy for one dollar and twenty cents a week, out in the dark before dawn and home after dark, with forty minutes off at noon.

He calls the work close to slavery, and he still counts that first wage above every later million. The reason is not the money. With it he was admitted to "the family partnership as a contributing member", no longer only a child to be fed.

That is the first lesson of the apprenticeship, and he states it without decoration: "It is everything to feel that you are useful." Before any talent or any luck, the ladder starts with being of some use.

The second rung looked like a step up and felt like a step down. A kind Scotsman named John Hay, who made bobbins, took him on and put him in the cellar to fire a boiler and run the steam engine that drove the machinery.

The fear of a mistake that could blow up the factory followed him to bed. He would wake at night sitting up, trying the steam gauges in his sleep. At home he said nothing: everyone was working hard, and no man would whine and give up.

What got him out was small. Hay needed someone to keep his accounts, and this boy could write a plain hand and "cipher". A modest skill, noticed by the right person, lifted him upstairs to become Hay's only clerk.

Carnegie says that if he had been free to choose, he would never have gone into business at all.

True✓Correct answer

True. He says so in his opening lines: poverty made the choice for him, and the question was what work he could get, not what he wanted. The richest industrialist of his day started out as a reluctant one.

At fourteen came the rung he calls deliverance: messenger boy at the Pittsburgh telegraph office. Books, newspapers, a clean office, bright windows. He was "the happiest boy alive", and immediately afraid of losing it.

The danger was real. A messenger has to know every firm and address in town, and Carnegie was a stranger to the city. So he gave himself homework. He learned the business houses street by street, until he could shut his eyes, start at one end of Wood Street, and name every firm to the top, then down the other side.

Notice the move. He did not hope nobody would find out. He took the one weakness that could get him dismissed and drilled it until it was gone.

Every messenger wanted to be an operator, so the boys slipped up to the instruments early, before the operators arrived. One morning Philadelphia called Pittsburgh with the signal for a death message. Carnegie took it himself and delivered it before anyone else came in. After that, the operators sometimes asked him to work for them.

He also learned to take messages by ear, at a time when he thought only two people in the United States could. His comment is disarming: now every operator does it, "so easy is it to follow and do what any other boy can—if you only have to."

The skill brought him notice, and the notice made him an operator at twenty-five dollars a month. Practice nobody asked for had turned into the next job.