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The part about Carnegie doesn't mention how he basically went to England and took a new process for making steel 10x more efficiently from some other guys, came
by anewaccountname 18y ago
The part about Carnegie doesn't mention how he basically went to England and took a new process for making steel 10x more efficiently from some other guys, came back and invested $100000 in a factory using the new process, and then had congress pass laws enacting tariffs on British steel. He wouldn't have gotten nearly so rich without those tariffs.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoProbably because that's a myth. Read Joseph Frazier Wall's biography of Carnegie -- he went to Britain and saw the new steel-making process, but so did many other Americans. Like Carnegie, they were unimpressed, because it made small batches of steel for which there wasn't a ready market. He got into the steel business about a decade later. But that story isn't as fun as the legend of the rapacious rapscallion, who only got rich stealing an idea nobody wanted and everyone knew about, ten years later. The tariff point is correct, though. He would not have been so rich. But he was the low-cost producer, anyway, so he wouldn't exactly have been hurting.