names that insistently come to mind are those of Carnegie,
Phipps, Frick, and Schwab.

Books have been written to discredit Carnegie's work and to
picture him as the man who has stolen success from the labor of
greater men. Yet Carnegie is the one member of a brilliant
company who had the indispensable quality of genius. He had none
of the plodding, painstaking qualities of a Rockefeller; he had
the fire, the restlessness, the keen relish for adventure, and
the imagination that leaped far in advance of his competitors
which we find so conspicuous in the older Vanderbilt. Carnegie
showed these qualities from his earliest days. Driven as a child
from his Scottish home by hunger, never having gone to school
after twelve, he found himself, at the age of thirteen, living in
a miserable hut in Allegheny, earning a dollar and twenty cents a
week as bobbin-boy in a cotton mill, while his mother augmented
the family income by taking in washing. Half a dozen years later
Thomas Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, made
Carnegie his private secretary. How well the young man used his
opportunities in this occupation appeared afterward when he
turned his wide acquaintanceship among railroad men to practical
use in the steel business. It was this personal adaptability,
indeed, that explains Carnegie's success. In the narrow,
methodical sense he was not a business man at all; he knew and
cared nothing for its dull routine and its labyrinthine details.
As a practical steel man his position is a negligible one. Though
he was profoundly impressed by his first sight of a Bessemer
converter, he had little interest in the every-day process of
making steel. He had also many personal weaknesses: his egotism
was marked, he loved applause, he was always seeking