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Carnegie Steel

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In the documentary we watched in class, Andrew Carnegie and the Age of Steel, I learned a lot about what steel manufacturing had to do with the Gilded Age time period in America. The film first opened by talking about how in the late 1800’s Andrew Carnegie was now the richest man in the United States. But how did he get to be that way? Well, that is what the film goes into next. New Englanders were faced with a crisis in these times, iron was too expensive, but iron was the thing that fueled the New Englanders industry. So the colony started to manufacture their own iron to try and cut costs. Many iron mills were created in the New England area, and some Americans, but many indentured servants from Europe worked in the iron mills. With America becoming a hub for producing iron, the British wanted to restrict the growth of the iron mills in the United States but ultimately failed, because by independence day, the United States now produced 1/4 of the worlds iron. Many cities emerged with the creation of the many iron mills in America, one being Pittsburg, which became iron’s capital. When Andrew Carnegie was a young boy, he was poor and worked as a telegrapher, until noticed and admired by Tom Scott, a man who was very knowledgable in the railroad and iron industry. Soon after Tom Scott discovered Carnegie, Carnegie became his assistant, and became very interested in iron and the use of it to build America’s many new railroads. However, while iron was a great industry for Carnegie, with the invention of steel in 1856, Carnegie soon began smelting iron into steel. Soon after, Carnegie had established many state of the art steel plants across the nation. One of the biggest steel plants Carnegie owned was the J. Edgar Thompson Steel Works in Pittsburg. This plant employed many workers and brought in about a yearly earning of $2 million. It was not easy though

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