The first contact between Americans and Bulgarians in the early 19th century was through American books and American missionaries. The first American literature to be translated into Bulgarian was Benjamin Franklin's introduction to "Poor Richard's Almanac", "The Way to Wealth", in 1837. In 1839 a Protestant religious society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sent the first Protestant missionaries to the Ottoman Empire, where the Ottoman Government had given them permission to preach to the Christian population. One of these missionaries, Elias Riggs, learned Bulgarian and published the first guide to Bulgarian grammar for foreigners in 1843. By the end of the 1850s, American missionaries had printed and distributed a version of the Bible in the Bulgarian vernacular. Charles Morse published a full textbook of Bulgarian grammar in 1860, and compiled the first Bulgarian-English dictionary.