Probably 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 oth

Probably 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.