Carnegie was a brigantine-rigged sailing yacht, equipped as a scientific research vessel, constructed almost entirely from wood and other non-magnetic materials to allow sensitive magnetic measurements to be taken for the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at their headquarters in Washington, D.C.. She carried out a series of cruises from her launch in 1909 to her unfortunate destruction by an onboard explosion and fire while in port in 1929.

Carnegie was designed by naval architect Henry J. Gielow and built at the Tebo Yacht Basin Company yard in Brooklyn, New York.

[1] Soundings taken during this voyage discovered and named the Carnegie Ridge off-shore of Ecuador and the West Coast / Pacific Ocean of South America.

[1] Carnegie carried a wide range of oceanographic, atmospheric and geomagnetic instrumentation and many scientists were associated with its findings and analysis, notably Harald Sverdrup, Roger Revelle and Scott Forbush (who escaped the fire that destroyed the sailing ship) when docked in Samoa in the South Pacific Ocean in November 1929).

[3] The loss of the sailing brigantine schooner / yacht Carnegie in 1929 after 20 years of work, left a void in the capability to collect oceanic magnetic data.

[9] The introduction of the proton precession magnetometer enabled magnetic data collection from steel-hulled ships routine by 1957 making the extreme measures used for Carnegie unnecessary.

Most significantly, the results showed that the atmospheric electric field—a quantity always present away from thunderstorms—shows a characteristic daily variation which was independent of the position of the ship.