At the age of seventeen Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to 'sub' for a few weeks and then got a regular job.
Franklin was a good printer and finally got to be a foreman. He made an excellent foreman. He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman so that strangers would think he owned the paper.
In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Franklin married, and established the Pennsylvania Gazette. He was then regarded as a great man, and almost every one took his paper.
Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper work, and everybody respected him.
Along about 1746 he began to study the habits and construction of lightning, and inserted a local in his paper in which he said that he would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new odd specimens of lightning, if they would send them to the Gazette office for examination.
Every time there was a thunderstorm Frank would tell the foreman to edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an old doorkey, he would go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a mess.
In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster of the colonies. He made a good Postmaster-General, and people say there were fewer mistakes in distributing their mail then than there have ever been since. If a man mailed a letter in those days, Ben Franklin saw that it went to where it was addressed.
Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on business and partly to shock the king. He liked to go to the castle with his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively speaking, and attract a great deal of attention. Franklin never put on any frills, but he was not afraid of crowned heads.
He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary War, but he couldn't do it. Patrick Henry had said that war was inevitable, and had given it permission to come, and it came.
He also went to Paris, and got acquainted with a few crowned heads there. They thought a good deal of him in Paris, and offered him a corner lot if he would build there and start a paper. They also offered him the county printing; but he said, no, he would have to go back to America or his wife might get uneasy about him. Franklin wrote 'Poor Richard's Almanac' in 1732 to 1757, and it was republished in England.