The young man was a good cabinet-maker, but his mind ran to inventions rather than to chests and high-boys. Steamboat navigation had not yet attained a commercial success, but Beach was a close student of the advance made by Robert Fulton and Henry Bell. First, however, he devoted his talents as an inventor to a motor in which the power came from explosions of gunpowder. He tried this on a boat which he intended to run on the Connecticut River between Springfield and Hartford. When it failed, he turned back to steam, and he undoubtedly would have made a success of this boat line if his money resources had been adequate. Beach then invented a rag-cutting machine for use in paper-mills, and he might have had a fortune out of it if he had taken a patent in time, for the process is still used. As it was, the device enabled him to get an interest in a paper-mill at Saugerties, New York, where he removed in 1829. This mill was prosperous for some years, but in 1835 Beach found it more profitable to go to work for his young brother-in-law, Mr. Day, who had by this time brought the _Sun_ to the point of assured success. Beach was a great help to Day, not only as the manager of the _Sun’s_ finances, but as general supervisor of the mechanical department. In the three years of his association with Day he picked up a good working knowledge of the newspaper business. He recognized the features that had made the _Sun_ successful--chiefly the presentation of news that interested the ordinary reader--and saw the neglect of this policy was keeping the old-fashioned sixpenny papers at a standstill. He did not underestimate other news. “Other news,” in that day, meant the proceedings of Congress and the New York State Legislature, the condensed news of Europe, as received from a London correspondent or rewritten from the English journals, and such important items as might be clipped from the newspapers of the South and West. Many of these American papers sent proof-sheets of news articles to the _Sun_ by mail. When Beach bought the paper there was no express service. There had been, in fact, no express service in America except the one which Charles Davenport and N. S. Mason operated over the Boston and Taunton Railway. But in March, 1839, about a year after Beach got the _Sun_, William F. Harnden began an express service--later the Adams Express Company--between New York and Boston, using the boats from New York to Providence and the rail from Providence to Boston. This was a big help to the New York papers, for with the aid of the express the English papers brought by ships landing at Boston were in the New York offices the next day. To a city which still lacked wire communication of any kind this was highly important, and there was hardly an issue of the _Sun_ in the spring of 1839 that did not contain a paragraph laudatory of Mr. Harnden’s enterprise.