Reuters

Origins

Paul Julius Reuter (1816–99), was born as Israel Beer in Cassel, son of a rabbi, and grew up in Aachen, Germany on the border with Belgium [Page 1224]and the Netherlands. Some time after his father's death in 1829, he gave up his Jewish heritage and name (as did many others due to rife anti-Semitism), though it is not clear how he chose his new name. After working as a printer and bookseller in Berlin, in 1848 he worked briefly as a translator for the new Havas news service in Paris (he may have replaced Bernard Wolff who was soon to begin his own news service in Germany). He briefly operated his own small news service in Paris before it failed and he returned home.

In Aachen he initiated a news and stock price information service (the “Institute for the Promotion of Telegraphic Dispatches”) that communicated to different cities using a combination of telegraph cables (the line to Berlin had opened in 1849) and a fleet of carrier pigeons (eventually some 200 birds) that often saved time over train schedules from Brussels, which was linked by telegraph to Paris. Reuters was not the first to use pigeons—Havas had done so in Paris and elsewhere—but his application became the best-known example of the “pigeon post.” Reuter sent his birds by rail to Brussels and they then flew back to Aachen the following day (faster than the train would allow) with tiny capsules containing news reports. From Aachen, the news was telegraphed east to Berlin. In 1851, the telegraph link to Aachen was completed and the pigeons were no longer needed.

Moving to London in mid-1851 to be at the center of world news and financial communication, Reuter opened an office close to the Royal Exchange, and the main telegraph offices. From his “Submarine Telegraph” office he began to transmit stock and agricultural market quotations and business news between London and Paris utilizing the new Dover-Calais undersea telegraph cable which opened for service a month later. As the telegraph network gradually extended across Europe, Reuter opened offices in other cities. It took several years for him to break into the tightly knit British newspaper market. He finally signed an agreement with The Times in 1858 to carry American news—but the first transatlantic telegraph cable on which the deal depended failed in a few weeks and would not be replaced until after the American Civil War. Instead, Reuter initialed agreements with competing papers to bring them news from the Continent. By late 1858, he was serving many British papers, including The Times, with breaking European news. And “news” had expanded beyond politics and war to include science, literature, religion, and even sports. In April 1865, Reuter stunned European financial markets with a two-hour scoop providing their first word of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Although the Associated Press story took 12 days crossing the Atlantic on a mail steamer, Reuters men chartered a boat to intercept the vessel off Ireland and telegraphed the news on to London. The same year the Reuters Telegram Company Ltd. was registered as a public company.

...