The age-herald., 1900-01-01
ANDREW CARNEGIE
 A MONTE CRISTO

A MONTE CRISTO Dumas was credited with considerable 1 imagination because he invented the Count
 of Monte Cristo. who was merely the bone
 ficiary of treasure trove; 1t never entered into the imagination of any literary man to
 take a telegraph messenger, without edu-
 cation or friends, and in half century
 make him dominate the world in one of it's
 greatest and oldest industries. standing
 like a Colossus with one foot on the Vest
 ern and one on the Eastern hemisphere,
 making the price Of iron and steel in all
 markets. and possessed of one of the two
 CT three greatest fortunes of which there l is any record The sale of the Carnegie in-
 terests to a syndicate closed the active
 career of the most wonderful successful
 manufacturer who ever lived, and it was the largest transaction involving only manufacturing plant and it's accessories that ever occurred. As the consideration
 was some 300 100000 and Mir Carnegies interest was about 60 per cent. of it, and he had a few small outside interests, the estimate that he is worth $20O 900 has very much frmer basis than most of the estimates of the wealth of men who are popularly supposed to be worth s5,0OO,0o0 or $10000OO0 and seem to ordinary mortals passing rich at that. In order to form some conception of what a private fortune se ta tain a unit of measurement from cities and states. The aggregate valuation of Della ware in the census year was a good deal b The actual, not assessed, value O. 4, estate in certain cities in 1890 was as follows-in millions of dollars: Denver, PIP; Minneapolis, 209; Buffalo, 2O4; Cleve- land, 215; St. Paul, 174 Milwaukee, l65; Newark, 157; Providence, 150; Detroit, 142; New Orleans, 112; Allegheny, H. Jersey City, 1O7; Omaha, 1O1; PortlanG,, Ore, 100.
 No amount of thrift, however will set the price of a rolling mdll directly out of the earnings of a telegraph messenger or an operator, or even a division superin- tendent of the Pennsylvania railroad. He was a very young man when he asso- ciated with Mr. Woodruff in the introduce ton of sleeping-cars and very soon after this he was the beneficiary of the one piece of what ordinarily passes for good luck in his career. He was one of the several men who bought the Storey farm on Oil creek for $4O0OO. and in a single year the profits were a million. After he got that start MT. Carnegie built up a fortune that has rarely been approached by sheer genius in the ap- plication of business methods. He benefited by no speculation, he was enriched by no rise in real estate he had no monopoly, qualified or unqualified he did not make his fortune by suppressing competition, but by making competition sharper than ever.
 A dozen years ago the furnaces of the Carnegie company had a capacity of CO., GOO tons of pig iron a year, and constituted the largest single furnace interest in the world. Saturdays papers contained the fact, obtained from the advanced sheets of the Pittsburg Chamber of Commerce re- port that in 1898 the Carnegie Steel com pany produced 2O69A66 gross tons of pig iron, three times the maximum capacity a dozen years ago. The average annual pro- duction of all the blast furnaces in the United States twenty-five years ago was only 2,3Oo,OOO tons. The company turned all this pig iron and about 100000 tons pur- chased into 2,171. .255 gross tons of steel ingots, and rolled these into finished pro- duets
 This steel is equal to nearly one-third of all the Bessemer steel made in the United
 States; it is a good deal more than all the | Bessemer steel and is equal to three-fourths of all the open-hearth steel made in Great Britain. The maximum capacity of the Carnegie works, about 5000 900 tons a year is five times the actual production of steel in the world in 1870, and within 9 per cent. | of the actual production of steel in the
 world in 1880.
 It has been said that it was a business principle of MT. Carnegie to produce his
 own raw material as far as possible. But this qualifying phrase is a very large one.
 Carnegie, Phipps & O. had been in the
 business for twenty-five years, and were among the greatest, and probably the great
 est, steel rail makers in the world before
 the Prick coke interests were annexed, MT. l Prick and MT. Carnegie buying stock in
 each others companies MT. Prick was l designed by nature to be Mr. Carnepie,s running mate. He was working on a farm | til ne was young man then he dabbled in l two or three things and fell into the coke | business rather than went into it He 1 bought ovens, he bought coal lands, he built more ovens and was presently the greatest