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

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The leading article on the first page was a semi-humorous story about an Irish captain and his duels. It was flanked by a piece of reprint concerning microscopic carved toys. There was a paragraph about a Vermont boy so addicted to whistling that he fell ill of it. Mr. Day’s apprentice may have needed this warning.

The front-page advertising, culled from other newspapers and printed for effect, consisted of the notices of steamship sailings. In one of these Commodore Vanderbilt offered to carry passengers from New York to Hartford, by daylight, for one dollar, on his splendid low-pressure steamboat Water Witch. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then thirty-nine years old, and had made the boat line between New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey, pay him forty thousand dollars a year. When the Sun started, the commodore was at the height of his activity, and he stuck to the water for thirty years afterward, until he had accumulated something like forty million dollars.

E.K. Collins had not yet established his famous Dramatic line of clipper-ships between New York and Liverpool, but he advertised the “very fast sailing coppered ship Nashville for New Orleans.” He was only thirty then.