The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical ConquestThompson, Holland
History
The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest
Thompson, Holland
Inventions -- History; Inventors -- United States
Benjamin was restless and unhappy in the shop. He appeared to have no
aptitude at all for the business of soap making. His parents debated
whether they might not educate him for the ministry, and his father took
him into various shops in Boston, where he might see artisans at work,
in the hope that he would be attracted to some trade. But Benjamin saw
nothing there that he wished to engage in. He was inclined to follow the
sea, as one of his older brothers had done.
His fondness for books finally determined his career. His older brother
James was a printer, and in those days a printer was a literary man as
well as a mechanic. The editor of a newspaper was always a printer and
often composed his articles as he set them in type; so "composing" came
to mean typesetting, and one who sets type is a compositor. Now James
needed an apprentice. It happened then that young Benjamin, at the age
of thirteen, was bound over by law to serve his brother.
James Franklin printed the "New England Courant", the fourth newspaper
to be established in the colonies. Benjamin soon began to write articles
for this newspaper. Then when his brother was put in jail, because he
had printed matter considered libelous, and forbidden to continue as the
publisher, the newspaper appeared in Benjamin's name.
The young apprentice felt that his brother was unduly severe and, after
serving for about two years, made up his mind to run away. Secretly he
took passage on a sloop and in three days reached New York, there to
find that the one printer in the town, William Bradford, could give him
no work. Benjamin then set out for Philadelphia. By boat to Perth Amboy,
on foot to Burlington, and then by boat to Philadelphia was the course
of his journey, which consumed five days. On a Sunday morning in
October, 1723, the tired, hungry boy landed upon the Market Street
wharf, and at once set out to find food and explore America's
metropolis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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