His rival, Andrew Bradford, printed an address from the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor in a slipshod manner. Franklin reprinted the same address elegantly, sending a copy to every Assembly member. The next year he was voted official printer for the Assembly. He started a stationer’s shop to sell paper, booklets, and miscellaneous items. Perhaps to impress the citizens of Philadelphia with his industry, he carted his supplies from the wharf in a wheelbarrow, wearing his leather apron.
Philadelphia boasted only one newspaper, a dreary and conservative sheet which Bradford published. Franklin talked over with his friends his own desire to start a livelier paper. One of them betrayed him to Keimer, his other rival, who promptly put out a newspaper with the ambitious title, The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Science, and Pennsylvania Gazette.
That poor illiterate Keimer running a paper? It lasted only until September 1729 when Keimer, head over heels in debt, sold it to Franklin for a pittance and departed to the Barbados, never to return. The Pennsylvania Gazette, as he called it, became Franklin’s newspaper to run as he wished.
That winter he performed his first scientific experiment, designed to find out if the heat of the sun was absorbed more readily by colored objects than by white ones. The experiment was so simple any child could do it; the wonder was no one had thought of it before. He took some tailor’s samples—small squares of cloth in black, blue, green, purple, red, yellow, and white—and laid them out on the snow a bright sunny morning. In a few hours, the black square, which the sun had warmed most, had sunk low into the snow; the dark blue was almost as low; the other colors had sunk less deeply; while the white sample remained on the surface of the snow.
Franklin thought in terms of the practical value of this discovery: white clothes would be more suitable than black ones in a hot climate; summer hats should be white to repel the heat and prevent sunstroke; fruit walls, if painted black, could absorb enough of the sun’s heat to stay warm at night, thereby helping to preserve the fruit from frost.
A glazier’s family named Godfrey had been sharing his High Street house. He was lonely when they moved. Even his close friends of the Junto could not ease his longing to have a family of his own.
On occasion he visited the Read family. Deborah’s marriage had turned out tragically. Her husband, a good workman but irresponsible, had, like Keimer, taken off to the West Indies to escape debts. Even worse, it turned out that he had a wife still living in England. Debby, who had come home to live with her mother, was so pale and sad Franklin was filled with pity for her. Perhaps first out of a desire to do good, Franklin did his best to cheer her up, and it pleased him no end to see the color gradually come back to her cheeks as her normally high spirits returned. No woman had ever appealed to him more than she. In time she responded to his affection. They were married on September 1, 1730.
Theirs was not the most romantic attachment in the world, but it endured. “She proved a good and faithful helpmate,” he wrote some years later in his Autobiography, “... we throve together, and have ever mutually endeavor’d to make each other happy.” Indeed Debby proved the ideal wife for an ambitious young man. She helped him in his printing orders, by folding and stitching pamphlets or purchasing old linen rags for the paper makers, and she ran their stationer’s shop. Since he preached the need of economy, she obligingly served him plain and simple fare and contented herself with the cheapest furniture. Nor did she complain when he went every Friday night to the meetings of the Junto.
The little club had now hired a hall for its weekly gatherings. As there was no good bookshop in Philadelphia, the members pooled their own books and loaned them to each other. This practice of communal sharing gave them so much pleasure that, at Franklin’s suggestion, they commenced a public library. Every subscriber, Junto member or not, paid a sum down to buy books from England, and there was an annual contribution for additional purchases. America’s earliest lending library had come into being, the first of many civic benefits which Franklin initiated over the years.
A rival organization to the Junto was the newly established Philadelphia branch of the Masons, mostly well-to-do citizens. The aim of Freemasonry was “to promote Friendship, mutual Assistance, and Good Fellowship.” Franklin succeeded in becoming a member by a rather sly trick, a note in the Gazette claiming knowledge of the “Masonic mysteries.” Since these “mysteries” were supposed to be highly secret, the members were so alarmed they invited the Gazette’s editor and publisher to join their ranks. For many years he was a leader in Masonic affairs.