Andrew Carnegie – Andrew Carnegie was born into a typical lower-class family in Scotland and lived in a weaver’s cottage; a tiny house. The main room served not only as the living quarters but also the dining room and the bedroom for the whole family. His family was suffering from near starvation and poverty when William; his father emigrated the family to Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the USA. The area in which they lived was very poor but better than their previous community in Fife. His first job was that of a bobbin boy, paid $1.20-a-week, where he helped change spools for 12hrs each day. Feeling this wasn’t the career for him, he became a telegraph messenger for $2.50 per week. This job came with a couple of perks too, such as gaining free entry to the local theater. He soon progressed to $4.00 per week at the age of 18yrs and through hard work and rapid development, Andrew climbed swiftly through the ranks. Eventually, he became an investor, investing the money he had saved over the years into Adams Express Company, a messenger service. Carnegie later received shares in a car business after helping to safeguard the shares of another business for a friend; he used this to his advantage and reinvested all his money into the railway industry. During the civil war Carnegie made a fortune through investments he had made; one of which had him investing $40,000 of his own money into Story Farm; a creek rich in oil. By the end of the year the investment had paid off in dividends to the tidy sum of $1 million, with more profits coming in from the petrol and oil goods.
Steve Jobs – Steve jobs, you either love him or hate him but there’s one thing that is certain; you will definitely know who is. One thing that you might not know him about him is that he’s adopted, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one the most successful people in the world and why should it. When Jobs graduated from high school in 1972, one of his first jobs out of high school was as a technician for the computer company Atari. This was possibly a big turning point for Steve. In 1974, the same year Jobs first worked with Atari, jobs went into business with his old friend Steve Wozniak. Jobs had convinced Steve Wozniak that it would be a good idea to assemble computers and sell them on for a profit. It seemed to the decent idea as they soon started making a profit from the computers they were making, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer company was founded as a partnership with Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak as the co-founders. Within just 4 years of the Apple Computer Company being founded, Apple became a publicly traded corporation, and in 1983 jobs lured John Scully away from the Pepsi-Cola company. Jobs went on in leaps and bounds, and in 1984 on January 26th jobs introduced the first Apple Macintosh. It wasn’t all pleasantries, though; in May 1985, following an internal power struggle between the board of directors, Jobs lost control of the Apple computer company and was forced out; although he did still have shares in the business. Steve Jobs then formed another company – NeXT computers which did very well. Then in 1986, he bought “The Graphics Group” which was later named Pixar Animation, for $10 million. Sometime later, in 1996, Apple computers company bought the NeXT company for approximately $429 million, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple as the company’s interim CEO. In 2000 Apple announced publicly that Steve Jobs was to become the permanent CEO of the company.
Henry Ford – Henry Ford, one of the few men that made mainstream automobiles a reality. He was born into a family of farmers who originated from England and Ireland. Not the wealthiest of families, but not poverty-stricken either. Henry Ford was a dyslexic entrepreneur. It is said that because of this, he would repeat certain actions over and over until he mastered them. In his teenage years, his father had given him a timepiece which he later took to pieces just to see if he could piece it together again successfully, which he did. He then did the same with other people’s timepieces and eventually, he repaired them too. Henry was also a sufferer of Dyslexia, and although this was a hurdle it was not a reason to give up. He completed an apprenticeship with James F. Flower & Bros, and also with the Detroit Dry Dock Company. In 1891 he met with Thomas Edison, who liked his concept of an automobile, so he allowed him to use his warehouses to manufacture two vehicles. Ford was grateful but later built his own company so he could build the cars on his own terms backed by William H. Murphy and in 1899 he founded the Detroit Automobile Company. This was short-lived, however, as the vehicles produced lacked the quality and precision Ford wanted and were horribly expensive. The business went under, but it didn’t stop him. Ford went on to build the Cadillac Automobile company. After almost failing a second time because of a lack of sales and high debts, more partners came into the business and the name was changed to the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company generated around 156 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2019
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Vincent Le is a pre-medical student at Georgia State University with an interest in surgery.
