“The whole trend of your mind seemed to be towards big things,” Andrew Carnegie’s childhood friend Tom David wrote him later in life. Carnegie rarely did anything small, especially once he amassed his fortune through steel. However, the captain of industry didn’t have grand or affluent roots.
Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, on November 25, 1835. His father’s trade was weaving, but industrialization put William Carnegie out of work. Carnegie’s mother, Margaret, hoped her husband would have better luck finding a job in the United States. The family moved to Pittsburgh, where jobs were abundant, and they didn’t face the same craft restrictions on skilled artisans that they had in Scotland.
