The common people of Pennsylvania at this time were pleading for paper money, such as was used in Massachusetts and other colonies, but the wealthier citizens opposed it. Franklin, siding with the people, wrote a pamphlet on “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” which he printed himself, and which swayed the Pennsylvania Assembly to pass a bill to issue such paper currency. For his contribution, Franklin was awarded the contract to print the money. Soon afterward, Philadelphia’s most esteemed lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, arranged for him to print the laws and votes of the government. Business was beginning to prosper. With all orders he took infinite pains. He kept his equipment in excellent shape, cleaning the type himself. He used very white paper and very black inks and sometimes made decorative woodcuts to illustrate advertisements. He hired a workman and took an apprentice, but outworked them both, staying in the shop from dawn to near midnight. His rival, Andrew Bradford, printed an address from the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor in a slipshod manner. Franklin reprinted the same address elegantly, sending a copy to every Assembly member. The next year he was voted official printer for the Assembly. He started a stationer’s shop to sell paper, booklets, and miscellaneous items. Perhaps to impress the citizens of Philadelphia with his industry, he carted his supplies from the wharf in a wheelbarrow, wearing his leather apron. Philadelphia boasted only one newspaper, a dreary and conservative sheet which Bradford published. Franklin talked over with his friends his own desire to start a livelier paper. One of them betrayed him to Keimer, his other rival, who promptly put out a newspaper with the ambitious title, _The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Science, and Pennsylvania Gazette_. That poor illiterate Keimer running a paper? It lasted only until September 1729 when Keimer, head over heels in debt, sold it to Franklin for a pittance and departed to the Barbados, never to return. The _Pennsylvania Gazette_, as he called it, became Franklin’s newspaper to run as he wished. That winter he performed his first scientific experiment, designed to find out if the heat of the sun was absorbed more readily by colored objects than by white ones. The experiment was so simple any child could do it; the wonder was no one had thought of it before. He took some tailor’s samples—small squares of cloth in black, blue, green, purple, red, yellow, and white—and laid them out on the snow a bright sunny morning. In a few hours, the black square, which the sun had warmed most, had sunk low into the snow; the dark blue was almost as low; the other colors had sunk less deeply; while the white sample remained on the surface of the snow.