Andrew Carnegie on Innovation

The Carnegie Mellon University history page records that Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and philanthropist, founded the institution in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools with an initial gift, originally stipulating that the school would not grant degrees and would instead train the sons and daughters of working-class Pittsburgh families for practical industrial employment. The page records that the institution was rechartered as the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 to begin granting degrees, and that the founding phrase My heart is in the work, taken from Carnegie's founding letter to the city of Pittsburgh, remains the operating motto of the modern university. The page treats the founding as a direct product of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth philosophy and as the institutional anchor of his broader educational philanthropy, alongside the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The Wikipedia article on Carnegie Mellon University records that the institution was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, with an initial endowment of one million dollars, and that it was rechartered in 1912 as the Carnegie Institute of Technology, before merging in 1967 with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. The article treats the founding as a direct expression of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth thesis applied to technical education, in which the founder's capital was used to create an institution whose graduates would, in turn, expand industrial and scientific capacity. The article notes that Carnegie originally stipulated that the school would not grant degrees, focusing instead on practical training for the sons of workingmen, and that the degree-granting recharter of 1912 was the institutional evolution that positioned the school for the merger that produced the modern research university.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching records that the institution was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 with an initial endowment of five million dollars, that Henry S. Pritchett was selected as its first president, and that the Foundation's original program was a system of pensions for retired college and university professors that subsequently evolved into the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, today known as TIAA. The article records that the Foundation's broader mission was to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of teaching, and that the institution subsequently undertook the standardization of American medical education through Abraham Flexner's 1910 report, the Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four, which ranked and classified American medical schools and led to the closure of many substandard ones. The pensions-plus-standardization posture is the operating template for Carnegie's approach to institutional philanthropy.

The Wikipedia article on the Edgar Thomson Steel Works records that the works were built at Braddock, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela River, beginning in 1872, and that they were named after J. Edgar Thomson, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who had been Carnegie's mentor and whose railroad ran adjacent to the site. The article records that the works began producing Bessemer-process steel rails in September 1875 and that they were the first major American installation of the Bessemer process for steel-rail production at industrial scale, displacing imported British steel rails in the American market within a few years. The article treats the choice of location — adjacent rail, river, and coke supplies — as the foundational vertical-integration bet of the Carnegie system, the operating decision that made the cheap-steel advantage reproducible and that turned the Edgar Thomson works into the seed plant of the entire Carnegie Steel Company.

The Wikipedia article on the Edgar Thomson Steel Works records that Carnegie had visited Bessemer steel plants in England in 1872 and that he secured the American rights to the Bessemer process for rail production, that the works were designed by Alexander Lyman Holley, the leading American Bessemer engineer, and that the plant's two Bessemer converters and rail-rolling mill established the production template copied by later American Bessemer plants. The article notes that the Edgar Thomson works continued in operation under U. S. Steel after the 1901 acquisition and that the works were substantially modernized over the following decades with open-hearth furnaces and, eventually, basic-oxygen-process steelmaking. The article treats the works as the still-operating physical foundation of Carnegie's steel fortune, since steel has been produced continuously on the Braddock site from 1875 to the present, making it one of the longest continuously operating steelmaking sites in the United States.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Steel Company records that the firm acquired the Homestead Steel Works in 1883 and that Henry Clay Frick proposed the consolidation of the various plants and assets, including H. C. Frick & Company, into a single operating entity, a consolidation that occurred on July 1, 1892, with the formation of the Carnegie Steel Company. The article records that the company headquarters were located in the Carnegie Building, an early skyscraper in Downtown Pittsburgh later demolished in 1952, and that Carnegie Steel made major technological innovations in the 1880s, especially the installation of the open-hearth furnace system at Homestead in 1886, along with vastly improved material-handling systems including overhead cranes, hoists, charging machines, and buggies. The combination of consolidation and mechanization is the operational basis for the scale advantage that made the firm Morgan's acquisition target in 1901.

The Wikipedia article on Carnegie Mellon records that the merger with the Mellon Institute in 1967 created the present research university, that the Mellon Institute had itself been founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon of the Mellon banking family as an independent industrial research laboratory, and that the combined institution retained the Carnegie name as the public brand while absorbing the Mellon scientific research apparatus. The article notes that the university's motto, adopted from Carnegie's founding statement, is My heart is in the work, and that the institution has subsequently become a leading American research university particularly identified with computer science, robotics, and engineering, with the school's computer science program regularly ranked at or near the top of American programs. The Carnegie-Mellon merger is the institutional embodiment of the founder-thesis: capital from a steel fortune and capital from a banking fortune, applied decades apart, eventually consolidated into a single operating institution.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii was named for him after he sponsored the expedition that discovered its remains in the Morrison Formation of Utah in 1899, that the mounted skeleton, nicknamed Dippy, became what one source calls the most famous single dinosaur skeleton in the world, and that casts of the skeleton were subsequently distributed to major museums across Europe at Carnegie's personal expense. The biography treats the dinosaur naming as evidence of Carnegie's broader program of endowing scientific research, which included the founding of the Carnegie Institution for Science in 1902 with an initial ten-million-dollar endowment and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. The paleontological patronage is the colorful edge of a systematic effort to institutionalize scientific inquiry in America that paralleled his libraries, his peace endowment, and his teaching foundation, and that took institutional form in Washington as well as Pittsburgh.