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Book Reviews
| Industrial Genius: The Working Life of Charles Michael Schwab. By Kenneth Warren (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. xiv, 285 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $35.)
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Industrial Genius, the latest book by Oxford University professor Kenneth Warren, is a comprehensive biography of one of the most influential and colorful of Pennsylvania's steel tycoons, Charles M. Schwab. Schwab (1862–1939), a protégé of Andrew Carnegie, played pivotal roles in the creation of two of America's greatest businesses, United States Steel and Bethlehem Steel. A visionary and a gambler, Schwab helped revitalize the steel industry when Bethlehem began manufacturing the wide flange or "Grey" structural steel beam. During the first half of the twentieth century, Bethlehem's wide flange beam—lighter, stronger and cheaper to produce than the conventional I beam—formed the structural framework of most American skyscrapers and long-span bridges. |
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Under Schwab, Bethlehem Steel also became the single most important producer of ordnance, ammunition, and armor plate for the Allies during World War I. By the 1920s, Charles Schwab was the American steel industry's de facto leader. |
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