ng of this period Mr.
Carnegie said: "If you want an idea as to heaven on earth, imagine
what it is to be taken from a dark cellar, where I fired the boiler
from morning until night, and dropped into an office, where light
shone from all sides, with books, papers, and pencils in profusion
around me, and oh, the tick of those mysterious brass instruments on
the desk, annihilating space and conveying intelligence to the world.
This was my first glimpse of paradise, and I walked on air."

Fortunately, the man in charge of the office, a Scotchman by the name
of James Reid, took a liking to the Scotch lad and began to help him
by teaching him telegraphy. Accordingly, during the leisure moments
when Andie had no messages to deliver he studied so diligently that in
a remarkably short time he became a skillful telegraph operator.

At this time his father died, leaving the support of the family to
Andie. To support them he must earn more money, and so he left his job
as messenger boy to become a telegraph operator on the Pennsylvania
railroad. While thus engaged as an operator he invented a system of
train dispatching that, each year, saved the company thousands of
dollars. This invention attracted the attention of the railroad
officials to young Carnegie, and he was made private secretary to
Colonel Scott, vice-president of the road, and a little later was made
superintendent of the Western division of the Pennsylvania railroad,
all before he was thirty years of age.

It was while he was superintendent of the railroad that Mr. Woodruff,
the inventor of the sleeping car, came to him with the invention. Mr.
Carnegie listened to a description of the proposed cars. He saw that
the idea was good and adopted it at once. Thus it was that on Mr.
Carnegie's division of the Pennsylvania railroad the first sleeping
cars in the United States were run.

Prior to this time all the railroad bridges had been made of wood; but
it occurred to Carnegie that bridges should be made of steel, rather
than wood. Accordingly, he organized the Keystone Bridge Company that
built the first steel bridge across the Ohio River. As the bridge
business grew, Mr. Carnegie decided that he could make more money by
making his own steel for the bridges. To do this he organized a
company and built the Union Iron Mills. So profitable were these mills
that in a short time he purchased the Edgar Thompson Steel Rail Mill
and the Homestead Steel Works. Gradually his