After the Carnegie's settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his mother had high hopes for Andrew. When his uncle suggested that Andrew might become a peddler, selling fruit and candy around the city docks, she was outraged. "My mother was sitting sewing at the moment," Andrew recalled, "but she sprang to her feet with outstretched hands and shook them in his face.What! My son a peddler and go among rough men upon the wharves! I would rather throw him into the Allegheny River.?" She wanted Andy to amount to something better in life, to become useful, honored, and respected. So Andy found work in a bobbin factory, along with his father. They worked in the hot, dusty, noisy factory until six o?clock each evening. "It was a hard life," he later remembered. For six days work, Andrew earned $1.20. "I have made millions since, but none of these gave me so much happiness as my first week's earnings. I was now a helper of the family, a bread winner." .
His father found factory work so depressing that after a few months he returned to his hand-loom to make his own tablecloths. But Andrew stayed on. "My hopes were high," he said, "and I looked every day for some change to take place. What it was to be, I knew not, but that it would come I felt certain if I kept on." As Harold C. Livesay wrote, "Young Andy thus showed that he had plenty of pluck, but as all dutiful readers of Horatio Alger know, pluck alone will not suffice; you have to have a little luck as well." Sure enough, luck arrived in the form of David Brooks, who managed a telegraph office in Pittsburgh. Brooks needed a messenger boy, and Andrew jumped at the chance to get out of the cellar at the bobbin factory. Andrew's eager manner persuaded Brooks to give the fourteen-year-old boy a chance. He told Brooks that he was ready to begin immediately, and instantly began to learn his new duties. "From the dark cellar running a steam engine at two dollars a week, begrimed with coal dirt," he later declared, "I was lifted into paradise, yes, heaven, as it seemed to me.
