Beach soon recognized Greeley as a considerable rival in the morning field, and there was a long tussle between the Sun and the Tribune. It did not content itself with words, and there were street battles between the boys who sold the two papers. Stung by one of Beach’s articles, Greeley called the Sun “the slimy and venomous instrument of Locofocoism, Jesuitical and deadly in politics and grovelling in morals.” The term Locofoco had then lost its original application to the Equal Rights section of the Democratic party and was applied—particularly by the Whigs—to any sort of Democrat.
Moses Y. Beach had no such young journalists about him as Dana or Raymond, but he had two sons who seemed well adapted to take up the ownership of the Sun. He took them in as partners on October 22, 1845, under the title of “M. Y. Beach & Sons.” The elder son, Moses Sperry Beach, was then twenty-three years old, and had already been well acquainted with the newspaper business, particularly with the mechanical side of it. Before his father took him as a partner, young Moses had joined with George Roberts in the publication of the Boston Daily Times, but he was glad to drop this and devote himself to the valuable property at Fulton and Nassau Streets.
If a genius for invention is inheritable, both the Beach boys were richly endowed by their father. Moses S. invented devices for the feeding of rolls of paper, instead of sheets, to flat presses; for wetting news-print paper prior to printing; for cutting the sheets after printing; and for adapting newspaper presses to print both sides of the sheet at the same time.
Alfred Ely Beach was only nineteen when he became partner in the Sun. After leaving the academy at Monson, Massachusetts, where he had been schooled, he worked with his father in the Sun office, and learned every detail of the business. The inventive vein was even deeper in him than in his brother. When he was twenty he formed a partnership with his old schoolmate, Orson D. Munn, of Monson, and they bought the Scientific American from Rufus Porter and combined its publishing business with that of soliciting patents.
Alfred Beach retained his interest in the Sun for several years, but he is best remembered for his inventions and for his connection with scientific literature. In 1853 he devised the first typewriter which printed raised letters on a strip of paper for the blind. He invented a pneumatic mail-tube, and a larger tube on the same principle, by which he hoped passengers could be carried, the motive power being the exhaustion of air at the far end by means of a rotating fan.
He was the first subway-constructor in New York. In 1869 he built a tunnel nine feet in diameter under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street, and the next year a car was sent to and fro in this by pneumatic power. A more helpful invention, however, was the Beach shield for tunnel-digging—a gigantic hogs-head with the ends removed, the front circular edge being sharp and the rear end having a thin iron hood. This cylinder was propelled slowly through the earth by hydraulic rams, the dislodged material being removed through the rear.
Mr. Beach was connected with the Scientific American until his death in 1896. His son, Frederick Converse Beach, was one of the editors of that periodical, and his grandson, Stanley Yale Beach, is still in the same field of endeavour.
CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR
Moses Y. Beach as an Emissary of President Polk.—The Associated Press Founded in the Office of “The Sun.”—Ben Day’s Brother-in-Law Retires with a Small Fortune.