Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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William M. Swain, another journeyman printer, also made light of Day’s ambition. He lived to be Day’s foreman, and later to own the Philadelphia Public Ledger. He told Day that the penny Sun would ruin him. As Day had not much enthusiasm at the outset, surely his friends did not add to it, unless by kindling his stubbornness.

As for capital, he had none at all, in the money sense. He did have a printing-press, hardly improved from the machine of Benjamin Franklin’s day, some job-paper, and plenty of type. The press would throw off two hundred impressions an hour at full speed, man power. He hired a room, twelve by sixteen feet, in the building at 222 William Street. That building was still there, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge approach, when the Sun celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1883; but a modern six-story envelope factory is on the site to-day.

There is no question as to the general authorship of the first paper. Day was proprietor, publisher, editor, chief pressman, and mailing-clerk. He was not a lazy man. He stayed up all the night before that fateful Tuesday, September 3, 1833, setting with his own hands some advertisements that were regularly appearing in the six-cent papers, for he wanted to make a show of prosperity.