Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie Part 10

"Well," I said, "Captain Eads will come to see you and in talking over matters explain this to him gently, get it into proper shape, lead him into the straight path and say nothing about it to others."

[Footnote 26: Captain James B. Eads, afterward famous for his jetty system in the Mississippi River.]

This was successfully accomplished; but in the construction of the bridge poor Piper was totally unable to comply with the extraordinary requirements of the Captain. At first he was so delighted with having received the largest contract that had yet been let that he was all graciousness to Captain Eads. It was not even "Captain" at first, but "'Colonel' Eads, how do you do? Delighted to see you." By and by matters became a little complicated. We noticed that the greeting became less cordial, but still it was "Good-morning, Captain Eads."

This fell till we were surprised to hear "Pipe" talking of "Mr. Eads."

Before the troubles were over, the "Colonel" had fallen to "Jim Eads,"

and to tell the truth, long before the work was out of the shops, "Jim" was now and then preceded by a big "D." A man may be possessed of great ability, and be a charming, interesting character, as Captain Eads undoubtedly was, and yet not be able to construct the first bridge of five hundred feet span over the Mississippi River,[27]

without availing himself of the scientific knowledge and practical experience of others.

[Footnote 27: The span was 515 feet, and at that time considered the finest metal arch in the world.]

When the work was finished, I had the Colonel with me in St. Louis for some days protecting the bridge against a threatened attempt on the part of others to take possession of it before we obtained full payment. When the Colonel had taken up the planks at both ends, and organized a plan of relieving the men who stood guard, he became homesick and exceedingly anxious to return to Pittsburgh. He had determined to take the night train and I was at a loss to know how to keep him with me until I thought of his one vulnerable point. I told him, during the day, how anxious I was to obtain a pair of horses for my sister. I wished to make her a present of a span, and I had heard that St. Louis was a noted place for them. Had he seen anything superb?

The bait took. He launched forth into a description of several spans of horses he had seen and stables he had visited. I asked him if he could possibly stay over and select the horses. I knew very well that he would wish to see them and drive them many times which would keep him busy. It happened just as I expected. He purchased a splendid pair, but then another difficulty occurred about transporting them to Pittsburgh. He would not trust them by rail and no suitable boat was to leave for several days. Providence was on my side evidently.

Nothing on earth would induce that man to leave the city until he saw those horses fairly started and it was an even wager whether he would not insist upon going up on the steamer with them himself. We held the bridge. "Pipe" made a splendid Horatius. He was one of the best men and one of the most valuable partners I ever was favored with, and richly deserved the rewards which he did so much to secure.

The Keystone Bridge Works have always been a source of satisfaction to me. Almost every concern that had undertaken to erect iron bridges in America had failed. Many of the structures themselves had fallen and some of the worst railway disasters in America had been caused in that way. Some of the bridges had given way under wind pressure but nothing has ever happened to a Keystone bridge, and some of them have stood where the wind was not tempered. There has been no luck about it. We used only the best material and enough of it, making our own iron and later our own steel. We were our own severest inspectors, and would build a safe structure or none at all. When asked to build a bridge which we knew to be of insufficient strength or of unscientific design, we resolutely declined. Any piece of work bearing the stamp of the Keystone Bridge Works (and there are few States in the Union where such are not to be found) we were prepared to underwrite. We were as proud of our bridges as Carlyle was of the bridge his father built across the Annan. "An honest brig," as the great son rightly said.

This policy is the true secret of success. Uphill work it will be for a few years until your work is proven, but after that it is smooth sailing. Instead of objecting to inspectors they should be welcomed by all manufacturing establishments. A high standard of excellence is easily maintained, and men are educated in the effort to reach excellence. I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of the fiercest compet.i.tion, when everything would seem to be matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality. The effect of attention to quality, upon every man in the service, from the president of the concern down to the humblest laborer, cannot be overestimated. And bearing on the same question, clean, fine workshops and tools, well-kept yards and surroundings are of much greater importance than is usually supposed.

I was very much pleased to hear a remark, made by one of the prominent bankers who visited the Edgar Thomson Works during a Bankers Convention held at Pittsburgh. He was one of a party of some hundreds of delegates, and after they had pa.s.sed through the works he said to our manager:

"Somebody appears to belong to these works."

He put his finger there upon one of the secrets of success. They did belong to somebody. The president of an important manufacturing work once boasted to me that their men had chased away the first inspector who had ventured to appear among them, and that they had never been troubled with another since. This was said as a matter of sincere congratulation, but I thought to myself: "This concern will never stand the strain of compet.i.tion; it is bound to fail when hard times come." The result proved the correctness of my belief. The surest foundation of a manufacturing concern is quality. After that, and a long way after, comes cost.

I gave a great deal of personal attention for some years to the affairs of the Keystone Bridge Works, and when important contracts were involved often went myself to meet the parties. On one such occasion in 1868, I visited Dubuque, Iowa, with our engineer, Walter Katte. We were competing for the building of the most important railway bridge that had been built up to that time, a bridge across the wide Mississippi at Dubuque, to span which was considered a great undertaking. We found the river frozen and crossed it upon a sleigh drawn by four horses.

That visit proved how much success turns upon trifles. We found we were not the lowest bidder. Our chief rival was a bridge-building concern in Chicago to which the board had decided to award the contract. I lingered and talked with some of the directors. They were delightfully ignorant of the merits of cast- and wrought-iron. We had always made the upper cord of the bridge of the latter, while our rivals' was made of cast-iron. This furnished my text. I pictured the result of a steamer striking against the one and against the other. In the case of the wrought-iron cord it would probably only bend; in the case of the cast-iron it would certainly break and down would come the bridge. One of the directors, the well-known Perry Smith, was fortunately able to enforce my argument, by stating to the board that what I said was undoubtedly the case about cast-iron. The other night he had run his buggy in the dark against a lamp-post which was of cast-iron and the lamp-post had broken to pieces. Am I to be censured if I had little difficulty here in recognizing something akin to the hand of Providence, with Perry Smith the manifest agent?

"Ah, gentlemen," I said, "there is the point. A little more money and you could have had the indestructible wrought-iron and your bridge would stand against any steamboat. We never have built and we never will build a cheap bridge. Ours don't fall."

There was a pause; then the president of the bridge company, Mr.

Allison, the great Senator, asked if I would excuse them for a few moments. I retired. Soon they recalled me and offered the contract, provided we took the lower price, which was only a few thousand dollars less. I agreed to the concession. That cast-iron lamp-post so opportunely smashed gave us one of our most profitable contracts and, what is more, obtained for us the reputation of having taken the Dubuque bridge against all compet.i.tors. It also laid the foundation for me of a lifelong, unbroken friendship with one of America's best and most valuable public men, Senator Allison.

The moral of that story lies on the surface. If you want a contract, be on the spot when it is let. A smashed lamp-post or something equally unthought of may secure the prize if the bidder be on hand.

And if possible stay on hand until you can take the written contract home in your pocket. This we did at Dubuque, although it was suggested we could leave and it would be sent after us to execute. We preferred to remain, being anxious to see more of the charms of Dubuque.

After building the Steubenville Bridge, it became a necessity for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company to build bridges across the Ohio River at Parkersburg and Wheeling, to prevent their great rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, from possessing a decided advantage.

The days of ferryboats were then fast pa.s.sing away. It was in connection with the contracts for these bridges that I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a man, then of great position, Mr. Garrett, president of the Baltimore and Ohio.

We were most anxious to secure both bridges and all the approaches to them, but I found Mr. Garrett decidedly of the opinion that we were quite unable to do so much work in the time specified. He wished to build the approaches and the short spans in his own shops, and asked me if we would permit him to use our patents. I replied that we would feel highly honored by the Baltimore and Ohio doing so. The stamp of approval of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would be worth ten times the patent fees. He could use all, and everything, we had.

There was no doubt as to the favorable impression that made upon the great railway magnate. He was much pleased and, to my utter surprise, took me into his private room and opened up a frank conversation upon matters in general. He touched especially upon his quarrels with the Pennsylvania Railroad people, with Mr. Thomson and Mr. Scott, the president and vice-president, whom he knew to be my special friends.

This led me to say that I had pa.s.sed through Philadelphia on my way to see him and had been asked by Mr. Scott where I was going.

"I told him that I was going to visit you to obtain the contracts for your great bridges over the Ohio River. Mr. Scott said it was not often that I went on a fool's errand, but that I was certainly on one now; that Mr. Garrett would never think for a moment of giving me his contracts, for every one knew that I was, as a former employee, always friendly to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Well, I said, we shall build Mr. Garrett's bridges."

Mr. Garrett promptly replied that when the interests of his company were at stake it was the best always that won. His engineers had reported that our plans were the best and that Scott and Thomson would see that he had only one rule--the interests of his company. Although he very well knew that I was a Pennsylvania Railroad man, yet he felt it his duty to award us the work.

The negotiation was still unsatisfactory to me, because we were to get all the difficult part of the work--the great spans of which the risk was then considerable--while Mr. Garrett was to build all the small and profitable spans at his own shops upon our plans and patents. I ventured to ask whether he was dividing the work because he honestly believed we could not open his bridges for traffic as soon as his masonry would permit. He admitted he was. I told him that he need not have any fear upon that point.

"Mr. Garrett," I said, "would you consider my personal bond a good security?"

"Certainly," he said.

"Well, now," I replied, "bind me! I know what I am doing. I will take the risk. How much of a bond do you want me to give you that your bridges will be opened for traffic at the specified time if you give us the entire contract, provided you get your masonry ready?"

"Well, I would want a hundred thousand dollars from you, young man."

"All right," I said, "prepare your bond. Give us the work. Our firm is not going to let me lose a hundred thousand dollars. You know that."

"Yes," he said, "I believe if you are bound for a hundred thousand dollars your company will work day and night and I will get my bridges."

This was the arrangement which gave us what were then the gigantic contracts of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. It is needless to say that I never had to pay that bond. My partners knew much better than Mr. Garrett the conditions of his work. The Ohio River was not to be trifled with, and long before his masonry was ready we had relieved ourselves from all responsibility upon the bond by placing the superstructure on the banks awaiting the completion of the substructure which he was still building.

Mr. Garrett was very proud of his Scottish blood, and Burns having been once touched upon between us we became firm friends. He afterwards took me to his fine mansion in the country. He was one of the few Americans who then lived in the grand style of a country gentleman, with many hundreds of acres of beautiful land, park-like drives, a stud of thoroughbred horses, with cattle, sheep, and dogs, and a home that realized what one had read of the country life of a n.o.bleman in England.

At a later date he had fully determined that his railroad company should engage in the manufacture of steel rails and had applied for the right to use the Bessemer patents. This was a matter of great moment to us. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company was one of our best customers, and we were naturally anxious to prevent the building of steel-rail rolling mills at c.u.mberland. It would have been a losing enterprise for the Baltimore and Ohio, for I was sure it could buy its steel rails at a much cheaper rate than it could possibly make the small quant.i.ty needed for itself. I visited Mr. Garrett to talk the matter over with him. He was then much pleased with the foreign commerce and the lines of steamships which made Baltimore their port.

He drove me, accompanied by several of his staff, to the wharves where he was to decide about their extension, and as the foreign goods were being discharged from the steamship side and placed in the railway cars, he turned to me and said:

"Mr. Carnegie, you can now begin to appreciate the magnitude of our vast system and understand why it is necessary that we should make everything for ourselves, even our steel rails. We cannot depend upon private concerns to supply us with any of the princ.i.p.al articles we consume. We shall be a world to ourselves."

"Well," I said, "Mr. Garrett, it is all very grand, but really your 'vast system' does not overwhelm me. I read your last annual report and saw that you collected last year for transporting the goods of others the sum of fourteen millions of dollars. The firms I control dug the material from the hills, made their own goods, and sold them to a much greater value than that. You are really a very small concern compared with Carnegie Brothers and Company."

My railroad apprenticeship came in there to advantage. We heard no more of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company entering into compet.i.tion with us. Mr. Garrett and I remained good friends to the end. He even presented me with a Scotch collie dog of his own rearing.

That I had been a Pennsylvania Railroad man was drowned in the "wee drap o' Scotch bluid atween us."

CHAPTER X

THE IRON WORKS

The Keystone Works have always been my pet as being the parent of all the other works. But they had not been long in existence before the advantage of wrought- over cast-iron became manifest. Accordingly, to insure uniform quality, and also to make certain shapes which were not then to be obtained, we determined to embark in the manufacture of iron. My brother and I became interested with Thomas N. Miller, Henry Phipps, and Andrew Kloman in a small iron mill. Miller was the first to embark with Kloman and he brought Phipps in, lending him eight hundred dollars to buy a one-sixth interest, in November, 1861.

I must not fail to record that Mr. Miller was the pioneer of our iron manufacturing projects. We were all indebted to Tom, who still lives (July 20, 1911) and sheds upon us the sweetness and light of a most lovable nature, a friend who grows more precious as the years roll by.

He has softened by age, and even his outbursts against theology as antagonistic to true religion are in his fine old age much less alarming. We are all p.r.o.ne to grow philosophic in age, and perhaps this is well. [In re-reading this--July 19, 1912--in our retreat upon the high moors at Aultnagar, I drop a tear for my bosom friend, dear Tom Miller, who died in Pittsburgh last winter. Mrs. Carnegie and I attended his funeral. Henceforth life lacks something, lacks much--my first partner in early years, my dearest friend in old age. May I go where he is, wherever that may be.]

Andrew Kloman had a small steel-hammer in Allegheny City. As a superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad I had found that he made the best axles. He was a great mechanic--one who had discovered, what was then unknown in Pittsburgh, that whatever was worth doing with machinery was worth doing well. His German mind made him thorough.

What he constructed cost enormously, but when once started it did the work it was intended to do from year's end to year's end. In those early days it was a question with axles generally whether they would run any specified time or break. There was no a.n.a.lysis of material, no scientific treatment of it.

How much this German created! He was the first man to introduce the cold saw that cut cold iron the exact lengths. He invented upsetting machines to make bridge links, and also built the first "universal"

mill in America. All these were erected at our works. When Captain Eads could not obtain the couplings for the St. Louis Bridge arches (the contractors failing to make them) and matters were at a standstill, Kloman told us that he could make them and why the others had failed. He succeeded in making them. Up to that date they were the largest semicircles that had ever been rolled. Our confidence in Mr.

Kloman may be judged from the fact that when he said he could make them we unhesitatingly contracted to furnish them.