at twelve years of age that Franklin signed indentures as an apprentice
to his older brother James, who was already an established printer. By
the time he was seventeen years old he had mastered the trade in all its
branches so completely that he could venture, with hardly any money in
his pocket, first into New York and then into Philadelphia without a
friend or acquaintance in either place, and yet succeed promptly in
earning his living. He knew all departments of the business. He was a
pressman as well as a compositor. He understood both newspaper and book
work. There were at that time no such sharp subdivisions of labor and no
such elaborate machinery as exist in the trade to-day; and Franklin
could do with his own eyes and hands, long before he was of age,
everything which the printer's art was then equal to. When the faithless
Governor Keith caused Franklin to land in London without any resources
whatever except his skill at his trade, the youth was fully capable of
supporting himself in the great city as a printer. Franklin had been
induced by the governor to go to England, where he was to buy a complete
outfit for a good printing office to be set up in Philadelphia. He had
already presented the governor with an inventory of the materials needed
in a small printing office, and was competent to make a critical
selection of all these materials; yet when he arrived in London on this
errand he was only eighteen years old. Thrown completely on his own
resources in the great city, he immediately got work at a famous
printing house in Bartholomew Close, but soon moved to a still larger
printing house, in which he remained during the rest of his stay in
London. Here he worked as a pressman at first, but was soon transferred
to the composing room, evidently excelling his comrades in both branches
of the art. The customary drink money was demanded of him, first by the
pressmen with whom he was associated, and afterwards by the compositors.
Franklin undertook to resist the second demand; and it is interesting
to learn that after a resistance of three weeks he was forced to yield
to the demands of the men by just such measures as are now used against
any scab in a unionized printing office. He says in his autobiography:
"I had so many little pieces of private mischief done me by mixing my
sorts, transposing my pages, breaking my matter, and so forth, if I were
ever so little out of the room ... that, notwithstanding the maste