deprived the Pittsburgh region of its chief advantage. As a
result of this sudden development, the manufacturers of
Pittsburgh awoke one morning and discovered that their ore was
located a thousand miles away. To bring it to their converters
necessitated a long voyage by water and rail, with several
reloadings. They overcame these obstacles by developing machinery
for handling ore and by acquiring the raw materials and the
connecting links of transportation. Ore which had been lying in
the wilds of Minnesota on Monday morning was thus brought to
Pittsburgh and made into steel rails or bridges or structural
shapes by Saturday night. The Carnegie Company first acquired
sufficient mineral lands to furnish ore for several generations
and organized an ore fleet which transported the products of the
mines through the lakes to ports on Lake Erie, particularly
Ashtabula and Conneaut. The purchase of the Bessemer and Lake
Erie Railroad, which extended from Conneaut to Pittsburgh, made
this great transportation route complete. Besides freeing their
business from uncertainty, this elimination of middlemen
naturally produced great economies.

Probably Andrew Carnegie's shrewdness in naming his first plant
the J. Edgar Thompson Steel Works, after the powerful President
of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in making Thompson and his
associate Scott partners, had much to do with his early success.
These two gentlemen conferred two priceless favors upon the
struggling enterprise. They became large purchasers of steel
rails and their influence in this direction extended far beyond
the Pennsylvania Railroad. What was perhaps even more important,
they gave the Carnegie concerns railroad rebates. The use of
rebates, as a method of stifling competition and building up a