lishers. The date selected for bringing out the sheet was most inopportune; a snowstorm prevented the distribution of the papers. After one week's trial, in a vain effort to dispose of a daily edition of two or three hundred copies, the price was reduced to one cent. The change was made too late, however, for financial resources had been exhausted and no printer was willing to assume the burden of continuing publication. After three weeks The Morning Post was a tombstone in the journalism graveyard, already overcrowded in New York.
FOUNDER OF PENNY PRESS IN NEW YORK
But in September of that year, Benjamin Henry Day, a practical printer, who had learned his trade on The Springfield Republican and had taken a post-graduate course in the composing-room of The New York Evening Post, did establish in New York a penny sheet to which he gave the very appropriate name of The Sun—said to have been suggested by a compositor, David Ramsey. According to Day's statement he had first planned a penny paper in 1832, when, on account of the presence of cholera in New York, he had scarcely enough business for his print-shop to pay his running expenses. In the spare time thus afforded he roughly mapped out the plans for a daily paper to keep his presses busy. In an address in 1851 Mr. Day thus told of his early venture:—
In August, 1833, I finally made up my mind to venture the experiment, and I issued the first number of The Sun September 3. It is not necessary to speak of the wonderful success of the paper. At the end of three years the difficulty of striking off the large edition on a double-cylinder press in the time usually allowed to daily newspapers was very great. In 1835 I introduced steam-power, now so necessary an appendage to almost every newspaper office. At that time, all the Napier presses in the city were turned by crank-men, and as The Sun was the only daily newspaper of large circulation, so it seemed to be the only establishment where steam was really indispensable. But even this great aid to the speed of the Napier machines did not keep up with the increasing circulation of The Sun. Constant and vexatious complaints of the late delivery could not be avoided up to the time that I left the establishment and until the invention of the press which permitted the locking of the type upon the cylinder.
