Benjamin Day

Benjamin Henry Day, born April 10, 1810, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and died December 21, 1889, in New York City, was an American newspaper publisher. In 1833 he founded The Sun in New York, the first penny newspaper in the United States, sold for one cent against the five or six cents competitors charged, and he pioneered selling bulk copies to newsboys to hawk on the street. The Sun's sensational 1835 series describing life on the moon became known as the Great Moon Hoax. Day sold The Sun to his brother-in-law Moses Yale Beach in 1838 for 40,000 dollars and later founded Brother Jonathan (1842), described as the first illustrated weekly in the United States.