Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Andrew Carnegie trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Andrew Carnegie arrived in Pennsylvania at 12, earned 1.20 dollars a week changing bobbins, and 53 years later sold his steel company for more than 300 million dollars and set about giving almost all of it away. This quiz covers the climb: the one-room weaver's cottage in Dunfermline, the telegraph office where he learned to read signals by ear, Colonel Anderson's library, Tom Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad, sleeping cars, the Civil War telegraphs, the Keystone Bridge Company and the Eads Bridge, and the Bessemer steel empire that J. P. Morgan bought in 1901. It also covers the shadows and the giving: the Johnstown Flood club, the Homestead lockout and the Pinkertons, Frick and the assassination attempt, Triumphant Democracy and The Gospel of Wealth, "the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced", 2,509 libraries, Carnegie Hall's opening night with Tchaikovsky, the Hero Fund, the Peace Palace, Skibo Castle, simplified spelling and the dinosaur named Dippy. Easy questions ask where he was born and what he made; the expert tier asks for dollar figures, dates and names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Carnegie, Carnegie libraries and Carnegie Hall, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller and Pittsburgh.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Scottish town was Andrew Carnegie born in 1835?
Dunfermline
He was born in a weaver's cottage with a single main room, shared with a neighbouring family.
Q 02What was Carnegie's father's trade?
Handloom weaver
Demand for damask collapsed and the family borrowed money to emigrate in 1848.
Q 03How old was Carnegie when his family emigrated to America in 1848?
12
They settled in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh.
Q 04What was Carnegie's first job in America?
Bobbin boy in a cotton mill
He earned 1.20 dollars a week for 12-hour days, six days a week.
Q 05What was Carnegie's starting weekly wage as a bobbin boy?
$1.20
A bobbin manufacturer named John Hay soon offered him two dollars a week to fire a boiler.
Q 06What special skill did the teenage Carnegie develop as a telegraph messenger boy?
Reading incoming signals by ear
He also memorised the faces of Pittsburgh's important men and the location of every business.
Q 07Which Pittsburgh colonel opened his 400-volume library to working boys on Saturday nights, inspiring Carnegie's later giving?
James Anderson
Carnegie resolved that if wealth ever came to him, other poor boys would get the same chance.
Q 08Which railroad executive hired Carnegie in 1853 and became his mentor and investment guide?
Thomas A. Scott
Scott made him superintendent of the Western Division at 24 and steered him into inside deals.
Q 09Carnegie's cousin Maria Hogan, whom he hired at the railroad, was the country's first female what?
Telegraph operator
He also hired his 16-year-old brother Tom as his personal secretary.
Q 10How did Carnegie's mother secure his first 500-dollar investment in the Adams Express Company in 1855?
She mortgaged the family home
She placed a 600-dollar mortgage on their 700-dollar house.
Q 11Carnegie arranged a merger between Theodore Woodruff's company and that of which inventor of the first-class sleeping car?
George Pullman
The sleeping-car investment was an early source of profit.
Q 12During the Civil War Carnegie was Superintendent of Military Railways and Union telegraph lines in the East. What did he jokingly call himself?
The first casualty of the war
He got a scar on his cheek freeing a trapped telegraph wire.
Q 13Carnegie's Keystone company supplied steel for which landmark Mississippi River crossing at St. Louis, completed in 1874?
Eads Bridge
Q 21Where were the nearly $230 million of bonds paid to Carnegie stored?
A special vault in Hoboken, New Jersey
They were held by the Hudson Trust Company in trust for his secretary Robert Franks.
Q 22After selling his company, Carnegie surpassed whom as the richest American of the time?
John D. Rockefeller
He then spent the rest of his life giving the money away.
Q 23Roughly what share of his fortune did Carnegie give away in his last 18 years?
Almost 90 percent
That was around 350 million dollars; the last 30 million went to charities after his death.
The St. Louis bridge was a proof of concept for steel and opened a new market.
Q 14In an 1868 memo Carnegie vowed to take no more than what annual income and give away the rest?
$50,000
He planned to retire at 35 and study at Oxford; instead he kept going for another 33 years.
Q 15Which steelmaking method did Carnegie adopt to mass-produce steel cheaply?
Bessemer process
It burned the carbon out of pig iron quickly; the resulting steel was ideal for rails but not for buildings.
Q 16Carnegie named his first steel plant, in Pennsylvania, after whom?
J. Edgar Thomson
Thomson was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie's best customer.
Q 17In which year did Carnegie combine his assets to launch the Carnegie Steel Company?
1892
By the late 1880s his works were the world's largest maker of pig iron, steel rails and coke.
Q 18Who bought Carnegie Steel in 1901, creating U.S. Steel?
J. P. Morgan
U.S. Steel was the first corporation in the world capitalised at over a billion dollars.
Q 19For how much was Carnegie Steel bought out in 1901?
About $303 million
Carnegie's personal share was 225.64 million dollars, paid in 5 percent gold bonds.
Q 20Who secretly negotiated the Carnegie Steel buyout on Carnegie's behalf?
Charles M. Schwab
He was no relation to the later brokerage founder Charles R. Schwab.
Q 24Carnegie's 1889 essay urging the rich to use their fortunes for society is known by what title?
The Gospel of Wealth
It first appeared as "Wealth" in the North American Review; Gladstone had it reprinted in Britain.
Q 25Carnegie's 1889 essay expressed support for which two fiscal measures?
Progressive taxation and an estate tax
He wrote that heavy death duties mark the state's condemnation of "the selfish millionaire's unworthy life".
Q 26Complete Carnegie's famous line: "The man who dies thus rich dies ..."
disgraced
It comes from the memo he wrote to himself at 33.
Q 27Carnegie's 1886 book Triumphant Democracy argued that which system was superior?
The American republic over the British monarchy
Its cover showed an upended crown and a broken sceptre, and it sold over 40,000 copies.
Q 28Which British prime minister became a friend of Carnegie and asked to have his "Wealth" essay published in Britain?
William Gladstone
It appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette as The Gospel of Wealth.
Q 29How many Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929?
2,509
About 1,689 were in the United States and 660 in the United Kingdom.
Q 30Where did the very first Carnegie library open, in 1883?
Dunfermline
His mother had laid the foundation stone during an 1881 family trip.