Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) is best known as the entrepreneur who launched the expansion of the steel industry in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Carnegie came to the United States from his native Scotland in 1848 and began his career in business in a cotton factory. By 1853 he had reinvented himself, first as a telegraph operator and then, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Carnegie was able to turn the relationships he had formed during his young manhood to his advantage, and by the early 1870s he had laid the basis for the Carnegie Steel Company. By the time he wrote his two-part essay “Wealth” in 1889, his company dominated steel production in the United States, and he personally was worth an estimated $350 million (the equivalent of $9.8 billion in today’s dollars).