After receiving too many orders of steel for Carnegie to handle, he turns to his mentor, Tom Scott and secures over 20 million dollars in today's money to invest and build the largest steel plant at the time outside Pittsburg. This new factory can produce 225 tons of steel per day.
With his new mill built, his timing couldn't be worse since the railroads were overbuilt and there was not enough traffic to sustain them. John Rockefeller, the oil mogul at the time, took advantage of the rail prices until Tom Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad moguls, agreed to raise both their prices to prevent Rockefeller from taking advantage of their railroads. Rockefeller then built oil pipelines which stopped all his revenue to Tom Scott, which put his Railroad Company out of business.
Tom Scott dies in 1881 and Carnegie blames Rockefeller for driving Tom to his grave. Scott meant a lot to Carnegie and now he pursues to become more wealthy than Rockefeller to avenge his mentor.
Carnegie's steel company, Carnegie Steel, is on the brink of collapse until Andrew finds a new market in structural steel such as buildings. In highly populated cities such as New York City, which had lots of unemployment, Carnegie used this to employ his steel mills while all the new buildings in America were being built with his steel.
The first skyscraper in the world is built in Chicago made from Carnegie's steel. American cities instantly become modernized as the skyline grew vertically and skyscrapers boomed. Skyscrapers soon made Carnegie one of the richest men in America