During his two years of formal education he excelled in writing but failed arithmetic. At the age of ten he was taken home to work in his father's cottage business, boiling soap and making candles.
He was not successful in Josiah's shop. At the age of twelve he was coerced by his father to sign indenture papers to apprentice with his older brother James, who owned a print shop. During his time in James's shop he learned the basics of the print business that, in the next decade, he would use as a foundation for technical invocations for print media. He also absorbed much from James Franklin's unconventional journalistic experiment, the New-England Courant, the newspaper James had founded in August 1721. The formula Franklin later devised for spicing up his own Philadelphia weekly with hoaxes and moral essays owed much to his brother's iconoclasm in print, though Benjamin would never become as radical a journalist as his brother.
The Courant represented a marked departure from earlier colonial journalism. Its flag did not contain the words "published by authority," meaning that content had been approved by colonial officials. Modeled after the earlier English essay papers the Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian, the Courant was intended to be readable and witty.
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