The type of the monthly periodical was fixed when Edward Cave, in 1731, founded in London _The Gentleman's Magazine_. Ten years later, and at the very time that Samuel Johnson, at St. John's Gate, was preparing for "Sylvanus Urban, Esq.," the reports of the parliamentary debates, Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford issued in Philadelphia the first monthly magazines in America.
These two magazines appear to have been conceived in jealousy and brought forth in anger. In the _Philadelphia Weekly Mercury_ of October 30, 1740, is the announcement of a prospective magazine to be edited by John Webbe and printed by Andrew Bradford, to be issued monthly, to contain four sheets, and to cost twelve shillings Pennsylvania money a year. The magazine, it was promised, should contain speeches of governors, addresses and answers of assemblies, their resolutions and debates, extracts of laws, with the reasons on which they were founded and the grievances intended to be remedied by them; accounts of the climate, soil, productions, trade and manufactures of all the British plantations, the constitutions of the several colonies with their respective views and interests; of remarkable trials, civil and criminal; of the course of exchange and the proportion between sterling and the several paper currencies, and the price of goods in the principal trading marts of the plantations. One thing only the new magazine should not contain: its pages should never be smeared by falsehood, nor sullied by defamatory libelling.
In the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ of November 13, 1740, Franklin announced a monthly magazine to be called _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America_. The price was to be nine-pence Pennsylvania money, with considerable allowance to shopmen who should take quantities. The brevity of Franklin's advertisement is in strong contrast to the learned length of Webbe's pedantic prospectus. He claims that the idea of the magazine had long been in his mind, and that Webbe had stolen his plans. Before he had divulged the scheme to Webbe he had proceeded so far in the matter as to choose his writers and to buy his small type.
Webbe wrote a wrathful reply in the _Mercury_ of November 13, and continued it under the title of "The Detection" through three numbers. He admitted that Franklin did communicate to him his desire to print a magazine, and asked him to compose it. But this did not restrain him from publishing at any other press without Mr. Franklin's leave. In the third number of "The Detection," Webbe accused Franklin of using his place of Postmaster to shut the _Mercury_ out of the post, and of refusing to allow the riders to carry it. Up to this point Franklin had made no reply to Webbe's abuse, but upon this new attack he dropped the advertisement of the magazine and put a letter in its stead in the _Gazette_ of December 11. He acknowledged it to be true that the riders did not carry Bradford's _Mercury_, but explained that the Postmaster-General, Colonel Spotswood, had forbidden it because Mr. Bradford had refused to settle his accounts as late Postmaster at Philadelphia.