The wealth and biography of the wealthy citizens of the city of New York: being an alphabetical arrangement of the names of the most prominent capitalists ...
Moses Yale Beach was an American inventor and publisher of the New York Sun.
Background
Moses Yale Beach was born on January 15, 1800, in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was a descendant of John Beach who came from England about 1635 and settled in the New Haven colony. The father, grandfather, and great-grandfather of Moses Yale Beach all bore the name Moses. Each Moses Beach was born on and worked in succession on a farm at Wallingford, Connecticut. Moses Yale Beach was the son of Moses Sperry Beach and Lucretia Yale, daughter of Capt. Elihu and Lucretia (Stanley) Yale. His mother died when he was four months old and his early years were directed by his stepmother.
Education
At the age of ten, according to Dr. Davis, Moses Beach "took charge of considerable of the outdoor work on the farm, besides going a long distance to school" and "from 4 o'clock in the morning until 11 o'clock at night he was generally up and doing, yet found leisure to exercise his mechanical ingenuity in the manufacture of playthings for himself and others. " When he was fourteen years old he was bound as an apprentice to Daniel Dewey, a cabinetmaker of Hartford, Connecticut. The lad's industry was so great that he soon won from his master a contract by which he received two cents an hour for overtime work - a concession which Beach used to describe, in his years of affluence, as the happiest incident of his whole business career. He later bargained with Dewey to buy his freedom at the age of eighteen years for $400; and so diligent was he in extra work at two cents an hour that in 1818 he not only released himself from his apprenticeship but had $100 of business capital.
Career
Moses Beach worked a short time as a journeyman at Northampton and then formed a partnership with another cabinetmaker named Loveland. Their work received a prize from the Franklin Institute. His next ten years were a struggle for success in the field of mechanics. He invented an engine, the power of which came from explosions of gunpowder. When this failed he turned to steam, then in its early stages, as the motive power for a boat which he intended to run on the Connecticut River from Springfield to Hartford, but his pecuniary resources were too limited to let him make a success of this enterprise. His next invention was a rag-cutting machine for use in paper mills. This would have meant a fortune for him if he had taken out a patent in time, as the process is still used. As it was, his device enabled him to obtain an interest in a papermill at Saugerties, New York, whither he removed in 1829. This, like his previous ventures, was not a financial success.
Five years later Beach went to New York City to join his wife's brother, Benjamin H. Day, the owner of the Sun, as manager of the mechanical department of that newspaper. Day had started the Sun on September 3, 1833, and in January 1834 took in his principal reporter, George W. Wisner, as a partner. In 1835 Beach bought Wisner's share for $5, 200, and in 1838 Day's interest for $40, 000. The Sun was then popular, having a circulation of 30, 000 copies daily, but its profits, which at one time under Day had reached $20, 000 a year, were small. It appeared for a time as if Beach would record another failure. "The first six months after he became entire owner of the paper, " says Dr. Davis, "it did not prove as profitable as he had expected and he was ready to sell it out; and he offered it and all the property he then possessed if anyone would take it off his hands and pay his obligations (about $20, 000) to Mr. Day; but, not succeeding in effecting a sale he went to work with renewed ardor and before two years had passed the last dollar was paid off. "
At the age of thirty-eight Beach's unflagging industry was at last rewarded by the beginning of real success. The following ten years were as busy as any preceding decade of his life. The Sun, although first in the field of "penny papers, " had to face the competition of the New York Herald, which James Gordon Bennett started in 1835. Though enterprising, Beach lacked Bennett's audacity. He established a ship newsservice, the Sun's own sailing vessels meeting incoming steamships down the bay and there obtaining the freshest news from Europe. Beach used horse expresses to bring important news from Albany "with unparalleled expedition, in spite of wind, hail and rain, " as the Sun said on January 6, 1841, when it was able to print Gov. Seward's message twenty hours after the Governor presented it to the legislature. Beach ran special trains from Baltimore to New York with the news of the National Democratic Convention of 1844, beating the United States mail train by an hour or more. When Beach bought for the Sun, in 1842, the building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Sts. , he built a huge pigeon house which stood for half a century on the roof. There lived the birds that brought to the Sun news from the ships at Sandy Hook, from Albany, and even from Washington.
The craze for speed manifested by Beach and Bennett is supposed to have inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the "Balloon-Hoax, " which he sold to Beach and which appeared in the Sun on April 13, 1844. In this fabrication Poe made it appear that the aeronauts Monck Mason and Robert Holland, the novelist Harrison Ainsworth, and five other Englishmen had crossed the Atlantic in a dirigible balloon in three days, landing near Charleston, South Carolina. The hoax caused as great a sensation as the "Moon Hoax, " which the Sun had printed eight years before; but in this case Beach made no effort to prolong the delusion, admitting two days after the first publication that Poe had merely tried to satirize the passion for speed.
Most of Beach's energies were directed toward the collection of legitimate news. He had a London correspondent who ran a special horseexpress with the newsletters from London to the ships at Bristol. He sent a reporter to cover Webster's speech at the unveiling of the Bunker Hill monument. In the Mexican War, when news was delayed between Mobile, where Mexican tidings arrived by steamer, and Montgomery, he established a special railroad newsservice between those Alabama cities.
The war showed Beach how the New York newspapers, each acting for itself, were wasting much money. At a conference in his office the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune, the Courier and Enquirer, the Express, and the Journal of Commerce founded the New York Associated Press, designed to cooperate in the gathering of news in Washington, Albany, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and other newscenters. This conference also formed the Harbor Association, a syndicate through which the New York newspapers were able, with one fleet of newsboats, to do the work in which half a dozen fleets had been employed. Beach is also credited with inventing the syndicated newspaper article, for in 1841, when the Sun received by special messenger President Tyler's message to Congress, Beach printed in his office a special message edition (all alike except the title heads) for twenty other newspapers, which were thus saved the delay and cost of setting up the message.
Beach was the first American publisher to issue a "European edition. " This was the American Sun, a weekly, issued in 1848, and sold abroad at twelve shillings a year. He also established the Weekly Sun, printed every Saturday and circulated among farmers at one dollar a year. Another venture was the Illustrated Sun and Monthly Literary Journal, a sixteen-page magazine lavishly illustrated with woodcuts. He personally wrote a brochure entitled The Wealth of New York: a Table of the Wealth of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City Who Are Estimated to be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars or Over, with Brief Biographical Notices. Several editions of this were published between 1841 and 1856. The price of this early "Who's Who" was twenty-five cents. Copies of it are in the New York Public Library.
Beach devoted himself more to the success of his newspapers than to the political quarrels which marked most journals of his day. His principal adversary was Horace Greeley, who founded the New York Tribune in 1841, three years after Beach became owner of the Sun. The newsboys of these rival journals fought in the streets, and Greeley's Tribune denounced Beach's Sun as "the slimy and venomous instrument of Locofocoism, Jesuitical and deadly in politics and grovelling in morals. " But the truth was that Beach was an honorable man of business, bent on keeping his Sun in its enviable place as the most popular newspaper in the world. On its tenth birthday, September 3, 1843, he was employing eight editors and reporters, twenty compositors, sixteen pressmen, and one hundred carriers. The Sun's circulation was 38, 000. Beach was compelled to buy a new dress of type every three months, for stereotyping had not arrived.
In 1848, when Beach turned the newspaper over to his sons, Moses Sperry Beach and Alfred Ely Beach, he anounced that the penny paper, then only fifteen years old, had a circulation of 50, 000, "together with the largest cash advertising patronage on this continent. " Beach had brought the Sun from a tiny three-column paper to the one of eight columns, although he never increased the number of pages beyond the original four. Beach retired from business life in December 1848 because of ill health, and spent his remaining years in his native town of Wallingford, where he died at the age of sixty-eight.
Achievements
Moses Beach was owner of the New York Sun. When Beach retired, the Sun had a circulation of 50, 000. He also established the Weekly Sun, printed every Saturday and circulated among farmers, and the Illustrated Sun and Monthly Literary Journal.
Beach was the first who invented the syndicated newspaper article and issued a "European edition. "
Moses Beach invented a rag-cutting machine for paper mills but didn't patent it.
Beach wrote a brochure entitled The Wealth of New York: a Table of the Wealth of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City Who Are Estimated to be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars or Over, with Brief Biographical Notices.
Moses Beach was a co-founder of the New York Associated Press and the Harbor Association.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Charles A. Dana, who bought the Sun from the Beach family in 1868, wrote of Moses Yale Beach that he was "a business man and a newspaper manager rather than what we now understand as a journalist, " but added that "under the stimulus of Mr. Beach's energetic intellect, aided by the cheapness of its price, the Sun became in his hands an important and profitable establishment. "
Connections
On November 19, 1819, Moses Beach married Nancy Day of West Springfield, Massachussets.
