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.
The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom. While the Sun did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous article. It was by ship that Sun readers learned of Daguerre and his picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and downs—mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan. There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were the doings of actors known to America:
At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys—father to the Miss Davys whose ears the queen boxed—has been appointed Bishop of Marlborough.
Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty pounds a night for sixty nights in New York.
On June 1, 1839, the Sun got out an extra on the arrival, at three o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen days—the fastest trip up to that time—and fifty-seven thousand copies of the paper were sold. The Sun’s own sailing vessels met the incoming steamships down the bay. The Sun boasted: