Boston, 1770-1775
As a publisher and printer during those volatile times, Isaiah Thomas made many contributions to writings on human rights and individual freedom. Early in his career, before the American Revolutionary War, his scathing criticisms of the ruling British authority had many times endangered his own life. It was partially through his newspaper, and a host of his other publications that many of the colonists in New England learned the facts of the oppressive conditions imposed upon them by the ruling British authorities. His newspaper and his patriotic efforts had in many ways, fueled the flames of the revolution.
He was born youngest of three into a poor Boston family on January 19, 1749. From the ages of six through sixteen, Isaiah was indentured as an apprentice to a Boston printer, Zachariah Fowle, where he learned his trade.
In 1767, he moved to Halifax and worked on the Halifax Gazette against the Stamp Act, a British Parliamentary tax law of 1765. He took such a strong stand against this measure that he was fired. In 1767 at 18, he settled for two years in Charleston, South Carolina, and worked as a journeyman printer. On Christmas day of 1769, he married Mary Dill, and moved to Boston in the spring of 1770 where he began a partnership with his former master, Fowle.
The first samples of The Massachusetts Spy were issued on July 17, 1770. By October 23, 1770, Fowle sold his interest to Thomas. At the end of October 1771, Isaiah Thomas moved his print shop to a house on the "south corner of Marshall Lane, leading from Mill bridge into Union Street". Then in 1775, Dill ran off with a man named Benjamin Thompson, which led to her divorce with Thomas in 1777.
For a short time in 1769, Thompson lived down the street from the printing office of Isaiah Thomas, in the attic of a shop called At the sign of the Cornfields, a building now known as the Union Oyster House, and worked as a clerk for the owner, Hopestill Capen in 1769.
In the next few years as the revolution was heating up, partially stoked by Isaiah Thomas through his rebellious publications and articles in the Massachusetts Spy, Benjamin Thompson at the same time became one of the most important spies for the British, who in 1773 - 1775 was the first to use invisible ink.
Later, Thompson became a world renowned scientist and was knighted by the King of England, and changed his name to Count Rumpsord. One of the things he was remembered for was his invention known as the Rumpford stove.
