United States Steel Corporation

The United States Steel Corporation was created in 1901 from the merger of Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel Company with two rival firms, in a deal arranged by J. P. Morgan that produced the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. The European founding belongs to Carnegie himself: born in 1835 in a weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, he arrived with his impoverished family in Pittsburgh in 1848. Over the following five decades he built Carnegie Steel into the largest steel producer in the world, applying Bessemer technology, vertical integration, and ruthless cost discipline. Carnegie sold the firm in 1901 and devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropy.