Besides freeing their business from uncertainty, this elimination of middlemen naturally produced great economies.
Probably Andrew Carnegie's shrewdness in naming his first plant the J.Edgar Thompson Steel Works, after the powerful President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in making Thompson and his associate Scott partners, had much to do with his early success.

These two gentlemen conferred two priceless favors upon the struggling enterprise.

They became large purchasers of steel rails and their influence in this direction extended far beyond the Pennsylvania Railroad.

What was perhaps even more important, they gave the Carnegie concerns railroad rebates.

The use of rebates, as a method of stifling competition and building up a great industrial prosperity, is an offense which the popular mind associates almost exclusively with the Standard Oil Company, yet the Carnegie fortune, as well as that of John D.
Rockefeller, received an artificial stimulation of this kind.
Though incomparably the greatest of the American steel companies, the Carnegie Steel Company by no means monopolized the field.