Today, we meet two wealthy men. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
America's emergence as an
industrial power in the late 19th century rested
heavily on two substances -- oil and iron. And two
people played a large role in providing these
materials.
Andrew Carnegie was born
in Scotland in 1835, and his family moved to
Pennsylvania when young Andrew was thirteen. John
D. Rockefeller was born four years later in upstate
New York -- the son of a trader, who moved him to
Cleveland when he was six.
Carnegie's early jobs practically mapped out the
technological emergence of 19th-century America. He
was a bobbin boy in a textile factory, a telegraph
operator, an engine tender. Then he worked with
railroads and with oil wells. But when he was 38 he
started the Keystone Iron Works, and he stayed with
that until 1901. By then Keystone Iron had become
U.S. Steel, and Andrew Carnegie had become one of
the wealthiest men on the planet.
John D. Rockefeller went
into business when he was 20, and he picked up his
first oil well as a sideline. He soon saw that that
was the right horse to ride. Even before
automobiles and airplanes laid their heavy claim on
oil, it'd begun replacing coal in the power
industries.
Carnegie and Rockefeller -- both staggeringly
wealthy by the 20th century -- came to giving by
two different paths: Even before he'd reached his
apogee, Carnegie wrote that a wealthy man's life
should go in two stages -- first gaining wealth,
then using that wealth to improve the general
welfare. And that's what he did. He established
Carnegie Institute, Tuskegee Institute, and many
other schools. He became the patron saint of
libraries. He set up charitable foundations.
Rockefeller, on the other hand, began giving when
anti-trust forces closed in on his Standard Oil
Company. He also set up charitable corporations of
all sorts to give away excess money. He began by
creating the University of Chicago. Whatever his
motives, Rockefeller gave birth to a dynasty of
charitable giving that extends right down to the
present day.
Of course, Andrew Carnegie makes the better hero.
He, after all, was part and parcel of the emerging
technologies that made our country. And his giving
sprang from some deep-seated core of principle. Yet
the Rockefeller clan assumed the mantle of public
service. They've become political leaders and
professional givers -- one died doing
anthropological research in New Guinea.
Money creates responsibility. Sooner or later, we
realize that we have a decent world to live in only
when the money created by our technological
foresight comes back around to increase knowledge
and beauty in that world.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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