[7] Hall was apprenticed in 1729 for five years at the age of 15 to a printing firm in Scotland run by John Mosman and William Brown.

[3][7] After the training he went to London and obtained a position at Watt's printing business alongside journeyman William Strahan, an acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin.

[3][11] In the letter, Strahan described Hall as a non-drinker, and an honest, hard working, skillful printer that was presently living in his house.

[11][12] Read presented the letter to his brother-in-law Franklin,[3][11] who needed an experienced printer[13] to run the Pennsylvania Gazette which he had purchased on October 2, 1729, from Samuel Keimer who had failed to make a success out of the newspaper.

[14][15] Franklin sent back a letter to Strahan on July 10 inviting Hall to come to Philadelphia for a job interview.

Franklin offered Hall a year's employment for the trouble of coming from England and trying the journeyman printer position.

[13][17] According to historian Dumas Malone the finest piece of printing from Franklin's press was published in 1744, Ciero's Cato Maior de Senectute, soon after Hall was employed.

[23] At this time the Gazette had an extensive circulation throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring colonies and was a very profitable enterprise; Hall assumed sole management of the newspaper.

[24] The business sale relieved Franklin of all further trouble about a livelihood and allowed him to devote himself almost exclusively to scientific experiments and other projects.

[27] The new firm of Hall and Sellers printed all of the Continental paper money issued by Congress during the American Revolutionary War.

[28] Some of these were used by Franklin and because of this three-way friendship (Hall-Straham-Franklin) it was the basis of the first sustained book-importing enterprise in the middle American colonies.

Wilberforce Eames of the Department of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library claims that the record book is in the hand-writing of David Hall.

[37] Before the Stamp Act became official Hall received word of its development in Parliament from William Strahan in London,[38] while news of its impending enactment quickly spread through the colonies.

[39] Hall warned Franklin that subscribers to their Gazette were cancelling their subscriptions in anticipation of the tax — not over an increase in the cost it would place on the newspaper, but on principle.