SYMHC Classics: Paul Julius Reuter

This 2019 episode covers Paul Julius Reuter, who had a knack for filling in the gaps in communication systems, and making a lot of money doing so.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This week's episode on Joseph Medill made me
think about another figure from the history of journalism, although
with a very very different claim to fame. That was
Paul Julius Reuter, who used telegraphs and trains and boats
and pigeons to deliver the news. This episode originally came
out February thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You

(00:29):
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. We have kind of an accidental theme in
the episode that I've researched lately inspired by things I
read on Twitter, which makes it sound like I'm reading

(00:51):
Twitter a lot, which is the opposite of true. It's
whenever I open Twitter, I just kind of zoom up
to the top and look at the three most recent
things and then go away from that. So I just
coincidentally have caught various interesting tweets lately. This time it
was author and science communicator Rosemary Moscow, who had a

(01:13):
Twitter thread about pigeons and how cool they are and
how they are all over cities because humans put them there,
so don't be mad at them for it. The pigeons
didn't do it themselves. And in this thread, one of
the things she said was Paul Julius Reuter of Reuters
used them to carry stock prices. And I replied and said, well,

(01:33):
now I have to do a podcast on Paul Julius Reuter,
which is where we are. The man who would later
become known as Julius Reuter was born Israel Beier Yosaphat
on July twenty first, eighteen sixteen. He was born near Kassel,
in the Electorate of Hesse Cassel, which would later become
Prussia and is now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel

(01:54):
Levi Josaphat, and he was the third of four children.
When the young Israel was about sixteen, his father died
and he was sent to live with an uncle in Gertengen, Germany.
His uncle ran a bank, and the plan was for
Israel to train there and then to enter the finance industry.
At about the same time, physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich

(02:15):
Gauss was also in Gertengen, experimenting with electrical signals and
telegraph technology. It is not entirely clear how these two
met Israel would have been running errands and making deliveries
for his uncle, so it's possible that he delivered something
to Gaus and they struck up an acquaintance. Regardless, though
Israel was fascinated by these experiments, which started in eighteen

(02:37):
thirty In eighteen thirty three, Gaus successfully sent a message
over a wire from his lab to an observatory a
mile away. In eighteen forty one, when he was about
twenty five, Israel started going by a new name, which
was Julius. It was probably after his birth month of July,
and in the early eighteen forties he also left the
world of banking and started working at a publishing house

(03:00):
in Berlin called Reuter's Publishing Company. In those same years,
he also met a woman named Ida Maria Elizabeth Clementina Magnus.
Some sources call her Ida, while others call her Clementina.
It took me a long time to find her entire
name written out and figure out what in the world
was going on with that. Clementina was the daughter of
a Lutheran pastor.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
There are some sources that describe the Magnus family as Jewish,
but that seems to be an incorrect assumption based on
the fact that their home was in Berlin's Jewish Quarter.
That would have been a logical place for Julius to
stay after arriving in Berlin, though so he and Clementina
probably meant simply because they were living in the same
neighborhood at the timeline on in all of this is

(03:42):
a little bit fuzzy. It's not clear precisely when Julius
started going by that name or when he met Clementina.
But in eighteen forty five, Reuter's publishing house sent Julius
to London to try to establish a branch there. London
had a large enough German speaking population that it seemed
like there might be a demand for German language books.

(04:04):
So Julius and Clementina left Germany for England by ship.
Then they departed from Hamburg, but before they left they
got married in a civil ceremony. They arrived in London
on October twenty ninth, eighteen forty five, and they were
listed in the passenger manifest as mister and Mistress josephat
and they got a room at a boarding house and

(04:24):
started planning another wedding, this one at a Lutheran church
officiated by a pastor, and their reasons for doing this
are not documented anywhere, but most historians conclude that Clementina
had gone through the civil wedding back in Hamburg so
she could travel with Julius without it being scandalous or
for the sake of her own conscience, but that she

(04:45):
didn't consider herself really married without that.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Big church wedding. On November sixth, eighteen forty five, shortly
before this second wedding, Julius was baptized as a Lutheran
and at his baptism he took another name, which was Paul,
and he also changed his surname from Josaphat to Reuter.
Once again, there's no documentation of what led him to
this name change, but it did mean that he was

(05:08):
harr Reuter of Reuter's publishing company as he was trying
to set up this London based branch of that company.
Don't really know what his employer thought about the fact
that he decided to do that. I imagine that opened some
doors for him that he might not have had access to. Otherwise,
one would think maybe he was just being really, really
wily in that move. We don't know, but the Sunday

(05:30):
after the baptism, Julius and Clementina got married in the
church ceremony. It still actually wasn't a very big affair.
I referred to it as a big church wedding before,
but it really wasn't. It was just the two of
them with witnesses that were provided by the church, and
then they started trying to build up their business and
trying to start a family. In eighteen forty six they
had a daughter named Julie, although unfortunately she died while

(05:53):
she was still a baby. By all accounts, Julius and
Clementina were a really striking couple. He was short and
had had very dark hair, and she was very tall
and blonde, and their marriage wasn't entirely conventional by the
standards of the day. Clementina was intelligent and educated and
really dedicated to her husband's success, so rather than being

(06:13):
mostly a homemaker and a helpmate, she took a really
active part in all of his various business ventures. Essentially,
she worked as anything from an unpaid assistant to an
unpaid partner, depended on exactly what was needed. But in
spite of Clementina's help, Julius wasn't able to get the
London branch of Ruter's publishing company off the ground. It

(06:33):
seems like there just was not as much demand for
German books as they had anticipated, so soon the couple
was back in Germany, living in Berlin, where Julius partnered
with Joseph Stargart to form another publishing house called Stargart
and Reuter. This was once again not one of Julius's
more successful ventures. Years later, Stargart accused Reuter of disappearing

(06:56):
from the eighteen forty eight Leipzig book Fair, taking all
of the money from their sales with him. Reuter didn't
admit any guilt in all this, but he did offer
to repay the money, which some people interpreted as basically
admitting he had done it, while others interpreted it as
just him wanting the issue to be over with and
having the money to do it that way.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, that's what I call a buy your freedom situation. Yeah,
I want you to leave me alone about this.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Here is some dollars.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Additionally, Reuter was publishing pamphlets that were for the time
quite radical. They advocated democracy and progressive policies. This might
not seem at all radical by today's standards, but A
revolution swept through Germany in eighteen forty eight and eighteen
forty nine. It was driven by an economic depression that
included high unemployment and food shortages. Peaceful protests failed to

(07:48):
bring about any kind of change, and after King Louis
Philippe was deposed in France, the situation in Germany progressed
to food riots and other violence. Reuter's pamphlets and the
demonstrators were on the same side.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
At first, it seemed as though this revolution was going
to be successful, especially after a number of progressives were
installed in the German government, but these changes did not
last and soon the progressives were once again out of favor.
By eighteen forty nine, conservatives would be back in control,
and all of this together led the Reuter's family to
leave Germany again. They settled, this time in Paris. In Paris,

(08:25):
Reuter got a job at Avas News Agency, working as
a translator. Avas News Agency was founded by char Luis Avas,
who was from a Sephardic Jewish family, and the agency
translated and distributed news articles. They mainly used pigeons to
distribute their work, although the agency was also starting to
experiment with the telegraph This combination of news and pigeons

(08:48):
and the telegraph would set the stage for Reuter becoming
a household name in the world of international news, and
we will get to that. After a sponsor break. In
eighteen forty nine, Julius and Clementina Reuter combined all their

(09:09):
experience so far to try producing and distributing their own publication.
It was essentially a newsletter. It combined stock prices and
news and political goings on, sometimes a little bit gossip.
But they were once again not really able to get
this off the ground. They just couldn't get enough subscribers
to turn a profit. So when collectors came to seize
their assets in eighteen forty nine, they decided it was

(09:31):
time to leave Paris. The next stop was Achen, which
is near the current border between Germany and Belgium. Achen
had come to prominence in the eighth and ninth centuries
as the home of the Emperor Charlemagne. Later, it had
become a thriving center of manuscript creation and publishing, and
it was well situated to be an information hub in
the geography of the day. It was adjacent to Prussia, Holland, France,

(09:54):
and Belgium. And that made it an easy connecting point
for travel, trade, and information. This trend in being sort
of a connecting point for all these things continued into
the nineteenth century as an international railway line made its
way through Auchen. But then on October first, eighteen forty nine,
a new telegraph line opened which connected Achen to Berlin.

(10:16):
There was a separate line across the border in Belgium,
and that line was a French Belgian line that ran
from Paris to Brussels, so Achen was on one side
of this gap in the line. The gap stretched about
ninety miles or one hundred and forty four kilometers between
Brussels and Achen. So if somebody bridged that gap, they
could connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line. And

(10:38):
that's someone or really those someone's were Julius and Clementina
Reuter who bridged the gap in the line with pigeons.
To be clear, they definitely were not the first people
ever to send messages using pigeons. Pigeons are the oldest
domesticated birds, and people have been using them for food, companionship, entertainment,
and carrying messages all over the world for thousands of years.

(11:00):
Pigeons and doves are in the same family, so some
people note the first documented message sent by pigeon has
that moment in the biblical Book of Genesis, when the
dove returns to Noah carrying an olive branch after the
Great Flood. Pigeons were used in ancient Rome to carry
the results of chariot races, and Genghis Khan had a
whole network of messenger pigeons. People have been doing this

(11:22):
for an extremely long time.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yes, pigeons were well established as a way to send
messages by this point. Reuter was just at an ideal
spot to make particularly good use of them. He established
the Institute for the Transmission of Telegraph Messages in Achen,
and on April twenty fourth, eighteen fifty he signed an
agreement with pigeon breeder Heinrich Geller for twenty five pigeons.

(11:44):
Geller is also who they rented rooms from when they
first arrived in Achen, and he may have also invested
in their business. So homing pigeons only fly one route,
they fly back home, and in this case home was Achen.
So this whole setup required there to be some in
Brussels to get the news from Paris by telegraph and
then transcribe it, load it up on the pigeon, and

(12:05):
let the pigeon go to fly back to Achen. Then
in Achen somebody had to collect the pigeon, retrieve the message,
transmit it by telegraph, and then load the pigeon up
into a special crate and take it to the train
station to send it back to Brussels. So running this
operation in Achen required both Clementina and Julius, one to
run the office while the other ran all of the errands,

(12:27):
including running those pigeons to the train station. It also
required an office in Brussels with pigeons whose home was
there to receive messages from Achen. That side of things
was run by Prussian Army officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Stephen. The
train trip between Achen and Brussels took about ten hours.
By comparison, the average flying speed for a homing pigeons

(12:50):
roughly sixty miles an hour or nine to six kilometers
an hour, so a pigeon could fly between Brussels and
Achen in about an hour and a half.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
That meant news carried by pigeon was much much faster
than news that was put on the train and sent
that way. The train, though, was still necessary to get
the birds back to their starting point. Julius Reuter was
thirty four when he started this venture, which focused on
sending stock prices and other financial information. It was known
as mister Reuter's Prices, and the birds were called the

(13:20):
Pigeon Post. It was his first overall successful business, although
it was really built on knowledge he'd been gathering since
his teens. He had learned about banking from his uncle,
about the telegraph from Karl Gauss, about pigeons from his
work with the Avis News Agency, and about writing and
publishing from various other jobs along the way. Reuter's new

(13:41):
business grew pretty quickly. On July twenty sixth, eighteen fifty,
a little more than three months after they signed their
first agreement, another agreement transferred all of Hergeller's two hundred
pigeons over to Reuter.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Reuter's success with the Pigeon Post wasn't just because of
the ingenuity and hard work that he and Clementina put
into all of this. Reuter was also starting to show
some business savvy. In April of eighteen fifty, he got
in touch with Rothschilds in London to sign an exclusive
business deal in which Reuter agreed to get London financial
information only from Rothschilds, while Rothschilds got the Berlin and

(14:18):
Vienna prices only from Reuter, with Reuter otherwise staying off
of the London market. Today this sort of collusion would
be somewhere between frowned upon and outright illegal, depending on
the industry and the location. But at the time it
was actually pretty normal.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
Yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be illegal to have the exclusive
agreement about who was providing stock prices and stuff. But
when it came to the and I also will not
do business in London, I will protect your monopoly there.
Like that's the part that today not so much of
a good business strategy in terms of ethics or the law.
Depending Reuter only ran this pigeon post for about a year.

(14:58):
A new branch of the telegraph line opened on October second,
eighteen fifty, connecting Achen to the Belgian city of Vervier.
The following March, another branch of the line connected Vervier
to Ostend, and then Ostend connected to a Prussian telegraph
network that ultimately got back to Berlin. So as of
March fifteenth, eighteen fifty one, there was no longer a

(15:19):
gap that needed to be closed in the telegraph network.
Later that same month, the Reuters closed up shop in
Achen and they left. And this move was another major
change for the Reuters. So we're going to take another
pause here for a quick sponsor break. After leaving Achen,

(15:42):
Julius and Clementina Reuter went to London, and they had
been advised to do so by Werner von Siemens, founder
of the telecommunication company Siemens, who had worked on that
new telegraph line that ran from Achen to Vervier.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Siemens later wrote of meeting them in Achen. Quote, in
the course of the construction of that line, I made
the acquaintance of the owner of the Pigeon post between
Cologne and Brussels, a mister Reuter, whose useful and lucrative
business was relentlessly ruined by the new electric telegraph. When
Missus Reuter, who accompanied her husband on the trip, complained
to me about this destruction of their business, I advised

(16:19):
the payer to go to London and to open a
telegram agency there, similar to that just formed in Berlin
by a mister Volfe, and we're going to get back
to this mister Volfe a little bit later. The Reuters
arrived in London in October of eighteen fifty one. They
got rooms near the London Stock Exchange and they lodged
there with a doctor named Herbert Davies. Reuter's Telegraphic Dispatch Office.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Opened its doors on October fourteenth at the Royal Exchange Buildings,
and they advertised their service this way quote Messages to
any part of the continent may be sent to this
office and will be immediately forwarded. Communications from the continent
to England may be addressed to mister Julius Reuter at
Kelly or ost.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
At first, this business in London was really about sending
telegrams for business and personal use, as well as stock
prices and financial news. It wasn't a traditional news service yet,
and they weren't at all the only telegram service in
the area. A lot of telegram and message services were
all springing up, hoping to make money off the ever

(17:21):
increasing telegraph lines connecting various parts of Europe. One of
the articles that I read describing this whole thing talked
about how before the telegraph made the use of pigeons
totally unnecessary, and there was still a lot of like
pigeon use connecting various people, like connecting London to the smaller.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
Towns and stuff. This part of town that they were in.
You needed an umbrella because there were so many pigeons
dropping so many droppings. Reuter didn't own any of telegraph lines.
He knew a lot about them, though, and he was
very good at prioritizing telegraph traffic and building relationships and
negotiating terms for the transmissions that he needed to send

(18:01):
and receive. Clementina continued to work really closely with him
in this business. She transcribed, She translated messages coming into
and leaving the office. Eventually they were making enough money
to hire a messenger boy, which was eleven year old
Fred Griffiths, who would eventually work his way up to
becoming a director in the company. Not long after their
move to London, Clementina got pregnant for the first time

(18:23):
that we know about since the death of their first child,
their daughter, Julie. A son, Herbert Reuter, was born on
March tenth, eighteen fifty two, and the Reuters went on
to have five more children, three daughters and two sons
at the rate of about one baby every other year.
So there's been some speculation that Clementina had trouble getting
pregnant or carrying her pregnancies to term, and that doctor

(18:45):
Davies had helped resolve that problem, and that may be true.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
He did for sure deliver at least some of the children,
but he didn't specialize in obstetrics, which was still a
relatively new field at the time. As the telegraph system
became in racingly prolific, there were more ways for people
and businesses to send their own telegrams. You didn't have
to write your letter and mail it to the care
of a particular person in another city in order for

(19:11):
it than to be transmitted from a loan telegraph office
that was out there. So over time Reuter's service forwarding
messages to and from the continent was not really as
necessary anymore. People did, however, want the news, and in
places that weren't yet connected by telegraph, whoever got a
story out first was at a huge advantage. As more

(19:32):
and more of Europe was connected by wire, it leveled
the playing field. But before the first transatlantic telegraph cable
was completed in August of eighteen fifty eight. Speed was
still key to making money from news coming into Europe
from North America.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
The only way for news to make its way between
North America and Europe before that line was complete, which
we have a whole episode on in the archive, the
only way to do that was by ship. Most of
these ships arriving in Europe doted Cork, but the first
place that they spotted land was in Crookhaven, about seventy
five miles or one hundred and twenty kilometers southwest. So

(20:08):
it took about eight hours for ships to make this
last leg of the journey from Crookhaven to Cork and
then dock and then deliver the news that they had
on board. So Reuter employed small fast boats at crook Haven.
Once the incoming vessel carrying the news caught sight of shore,
somewhat aboard, would chuck a dispatch off the side in
a sealed container. Reuter's smaller ship would retrieve it, take

(20:31):
it back to shore, and telegraph the dispatch back to London.
And there were ships doing this same thing on the
other end of the journey at Nova Scotia. It cracks
me up that this is how people were trying to
get the story out first was just by hucking containers
off the sides of boats.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
I mean they were sending pigeons with trust.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
So yeah, so Reuter did know that eventually there would
be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So
it's just like the telegraph had closed the gap and
made his pigeon post obsolete. At some point, this same
exact thing was going to happen to his whole Krickhaven
message chucking operation. The same was true anywhere else that

(21:13):
he was able to get an edge by being faster
than his competition, So he increasingly turned his eye to
actually reporting the news instead of just collecting and distributing it.
He started hiring journalists and editors and started what we'd
recognize today as a wire service, a service that gathered
and reported news and sold it to multiple newspapers. His

(21:34):
first subscriber was The Morning Advertiser in October eighteen fifty eight.
By that point, Reuter had been in London for seven
years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the
year before. Reuter's big break came in eighteen fifty nine
with a speech made by Napoleon the third, Napoleon had
been overheard talking to the Austrian ambassador at a New

(21:55):
Year's reception, saying something along the lines of saying he
was sorry. The two nations didn't have quite the friendly
relationship they used to. This made international news because it
implied that France might be headed toward a war with Austria.
The following February seventh, Napoleon the Third was scheduled to
make a speech before the French Parliament, one that world
leaders suspected would confirm France's intent to go to war.

(22:18):
Reuter took full advantage of this. He had some of
his best staff on hand in Paris, and he reserved
time on a telegraph line to coincide with the scheduled speech,
and his agent even managed to get a copy of
the speech ahead of time, under the condition that it
not be opened until the speech began. Very curious about
how he did that, but I do not know the answer.

(22:40):
It's basically like embargoes that still happened today. Yes, of
you can have this information, but you can't publish your
article until a certain time. However, though regardless of by
what means, they had a copy of the speech when
Napoleon did start giving it. The French agent started transmitting
the speech word for word to London, where it appeared

(23:00):
in a special edition of The Times just a couple
of hours after it had been delivered. The speech did
indeed confirm that Napoleon would be going to war. This
was part of what would come to be known as
the Second Italian War of Independence. Plenty of other papers
would report on this speech later, but the Times reported
it first. This also meant that the newspapers that had

(23:21):
been like, ah, I don't really know why I should
sign up for this whole Reuter news service, a bunch
of them now got on board. And then once the
war actually started, Reuter also had reporters embedded with the
troops in Austria, France, and Italy. In eighteen sixty five,
Reuter was also the first in Europe to report the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That same year, he established a

(23:43):
news office in Alexandria. In eighteen sixty eight, Britain started
nationalizing the telegraph service, which really affected Reuter's business and
the news industry as a whole. Reuter's, the London newspapers
and the regional newspapers known as the provincial press were
out kind of a complicated pricing scheme among themselves to

(24:04):
make up for these changes in the telegraph system. In
the process, the provincial papers formed the Press Association to
give themselves collective bargaining power with Reuter. They also negotiated
a whole deal in which Reuter had control of the
London news market, but the Press Association had exclusive rights
to Reuter's news outside of London. The Press Association also

(24:26):
agreed not to do international reporting, leaving that to Reuter's agency,
and this also contributed to Reuter tried to really diversify
the businesses that he was in in the eighteen eighties
and eighteen nineties because the nationalization of the telegraph and
all the changes that then trickled down with all of
this were eating into his profit margin.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
These kinds of negotiations were also happening internationally. By eighteen seventy,
three primary wire services were reporting the news from three
different parts of Europe. Reuter was in England, Avas was
in France, and Vote, who we mentioned earlier was in Germany,
and rather than compete with each other, these three businesses
got together to protect each other's monopolies. In different parts

(25:08):
of the world. On January seventeenth, eighteen seventy, they agreed
that vof would be in Germany, AVUS would be in France,
and Reuter would have the entire British Empire, and this
agreement was in place until nineteen thirty four.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Once again, this arrangement today would probably run a foul
of anti trust laws and a lot of places, but
at the time this was not an uncommon way of
doing business, and it also had parallels to things happening
at the same time in the more political arena, like
the Scramble for Africa, where countries were basically dividing Africa
up amongst themselves. Also, these three services were intrinsically connected

(25:47):
to each other. Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolf had both
worked as translators for the of US agency, which was
known in French as Agents of Us.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
In eighteen seventy one, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Gotta
made Reuter a baron, and Queen Victoria later recognized his
rank in Britain. In eighteen seventy two, Reuters expanded into
East Asia.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
That same year, Julius Reuter was also temporarily given huge
control over multiple industries in Iran, which at the time
was often also known as Persia. Reuter had become friends
with the Persian minister in London, and at the same
time the Shah Naser Aldin Shah Kajar was making a
series of concessions to British interests. He signed what was

(26:31):
known as the Reuter Concession, which gave Reuter the rights
to railways, factories, mining, irrigation and telegraphs in Iran.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
This went really badly. Reuter got into this without really
going through any British diplomatic channels, and British politicians all
over the political spectrum tried to distance themselves from it.
An editorial in The Times of London said, in part quote,
there has been nothing like it before. The King of
King's Amba decated the functions, if not the splendor of royalty,

(27:03):
and though still gorgeous and glittering, is unable to make
a road, explore a mine, or irrigate the lands under
his dominion. So he calls in an enterprising financier of
the West and offers him many and precious advantages if
he will relieve the shaw in Shaw of the real
duties of royalty.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Meanwhile, Russia, which had been expanding into neighboring parts of
the world, saw this whole thing as a huge threat
and suspected that all those British officials who were distancing
themselves from what Reuter had done were really just trying
to cover up their own involvement in a British power grab.
And the people of Iran were outraged the Shaw was
making such huge concessions to British interests. The Shaw reversed

(27:45):
the concession after about a year, but Reuter still had
interests in Iran. This revised agreement with the Shaw established
an Imperial Bank, and his son George became its president.
The whole thing also set the stage for another concession
of tobacco interests from Iran to Britain twenty years later,
and that led to a huge uprising in Iran.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
The Reuters News organization kept expanding over the next decade,
becoming known as the largest international news service in the world,
although it was also criticized for unnecessarily graphic coverage, especially
during wartime. Here's an example from an eighteen eighty three
memo to correspondence written after Julius Reuter's retirement. Quote in

(28:28):
consequence of the increased attention paid by press to disaster
et cetera of all kinds. Agents and correspondents are requested
to be good enough in future to notice all occurrences
of the sort. The following are events that should be
comprised on the service. Fires, explosions, floods, inundations, railway accidents,

(28:50):
destructive storms, earthquakes, shipwrecks attended with loss of life, accidents
to war vessels and to mail steamers, street ryoce of
a grave character, disturbances arising from strikes, duels between and
suicides of persons of note, social or political, and murders

(29:10):
of a sensational or atrocious character. It is requested that
the bare facts be first telegraphed with the utmost promptitude,
and as soon as possible afterwards, a descriptive account proportionate
to the gravity of the incident. So very long way
of saying, if it bleeds, it leads, yes, one hundred percent.
Reuter retired in eighteen seventy eight, and his son took

(29:32):
over the agency, although Julius continued to be involved in
the business for some time afterward, and by this point
the Reuter family had become really wealthy. The business also
continued to try to stay ahead of new technologies that
became sort of part of its pattern of business. It
kept adopting faster and better ways of distributing the news
as these ways were invented, including using column printers, teletypes, radio,

(29:56):
and satellites. Julius Reuter died at his mansion of Villa
Reuter in Nice, France, on February twenty fifth, eighteen ninety nine.
It came across the Reuter's wire quote. Baron de Ruter,
the founder of Reuter's agency, died at Nice this morning
in his eighty third year. His wife, Clementina, died on
August fifth, nineteen eleven, in London, and not much is

(30:19):
known about her life between her husband's death and hers,
except that she had an active social life and was
very good at poker. These are things we know from
her obituary at this point. They also have no living descendants.
The fourth Baron de Ruter died in nineteen fifty eight
and his widow died in two thousand and nine. But
it's clear that Reuter's could not have become the company

(30:40):
that it did without her, and without her mostly unpaid work,
there aren't even any pictures of Clementina in the Reuter's archive.
We do know that she sat for a formal portrait
at one point, but that portrait now cannot be found.
I kind of wanted to name this episode after both
of them, but there just wasn't enough information about her,

(31:00):
and then that seemed disingenuous. It would be impossible to
tell the entire history of Reuters as a business between
then and now, but Reuters still exists as an international
news organization and is a division of Thompson Reuters after
being acquired by Thompson in two thousand and eight. Ajen
Avas also became a Gen's France Press or AFP.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, so two of the three places that had that
sort of divvying up monopoly still exist in some form
today as far as I know. Wolf did not, it
was taken over by Nazis, and Is I think was
later has its own decides. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
It's one of those things where you think about, uh Reuter,
the man touched so many things that continued to have
echoing after effects. I mean, he basically like destabilized huge
parts of Iran. In addition to his savvy in the
business world, creating news agencies. Yeah, and we really didn't
get into it here, but I read an interesting article

(31:59):
preparing for the that was about how not just international
news agencies, but domestic news agencies have a huge effect
on culture and on language because, like I mean, you
and I for years have used the Associated Press style
guide as like that was has been like the go
to style guide at how stuff works, even though how

(32:20):
stuff Works has never been strictly a news reporting thing,
And like how these style guides affect what is considered
to be correct usage and all kinds of contexts even
when they're not strictly journalism contexts. It was super interesting,
but also not totally related to Reuter himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
He's at the center of a lot of developments that

(32:43):
continue to reverberate.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can ribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.