February 13, 2019 • 36 mins
Paul Julius Reuter had a knack for filling in the gaps in communication systems, and make a lot of money doing so. And eventually, he managed to to turn Reuters - which he had named himself after - into the largest international news service in the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we have very exciting news some of you
have heard before. We're gonna talk about it again. We
are going to Paris. We're just gonna keep talking about
it NonStop because the excitement level is off the charts. Yes, uh,
you can come with us, which is the cool part. Uh.
There is information on our website. If you go to
Miston History dot com and you click on the link
(00:21):
in the menu at the top of the page, it
says Paris trip. That's the one it will take you
to all the info. One thing that we wanted to
make sure people know is it if you are a
solo traveler and you're not maybe able to corral friends
to go with you, do not fret. Please go ahead
and sign up because there will be lots of solo
travelers and also we're all one big, happy history family
running around Paris, so you will have plenty of of
(00:42):
opportunities to socialize if you wish, uh, and then plenty
of opportunities to go run away by yourself if you
need downtime. Yes, I know that traveling alone, especially traveling
alone to another country, can be a little intimidating, but
I am a hard core supporter of that it is
something I love to do myself. So regardless of whether
(01:02):
you're traveling with a partner or a friend or by yourself,
everyone is welcome. Also, we've gotten a couple of questions
from folks about whether people from outside the United States
can come on the trip, because the wording on the
website made it sound as though you needed a valid
US passport. It is open to people from other countries
as well, and they are updating that language on the
website and there's contact information. Um, if you go to
(01:25):
our website, we have a link to the Defined Destination's website,
which is where the trip is being coordinated, and there's
contact information there and you can contact them with any
specific questions you have about your travel situation. Yeah, so
we hope you come with us. That's gonna be June
of this year and we're going to have a blast.
Uh So, we hope we see you in Paris. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff
(01:48):
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Trying. 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 Twitter a lot, which is the
(02:10):
opposite of true. It's whenever I opened 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 Twitter thread about pigeons and how cool
(02:32):
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 Reuter's used them to carry stock prices.
And I replied and said, well, now I have to
do a podcast on Paul Julius Reuter, which is where
(02:54):
we are. The man who would later become known as
Julius Reuter was born Israel Beer Yosfat on July twenty one,
eighteen sixteen. He was born near Kassel in the Electorate
of hess Castle, which would later become Prussia and is
now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Josefat, and
he was the third of four children. When the young
(03:15):
Israel was about sixteen, his father died and he was
sent to live with an uncle in Gertingen, 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
Gauss was also in Gertingen, experimenting with electrical signals and
(03:36):
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
Gauss and they struck up an acquaintance. Regardless, though Israel
was fascinated by these experiments, which started in eighteen thirty
In eighteen thirty three, Gauss successfully sent a message over
(03:58):
a wire from his lab um 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
in Berlin called Reuter's Publishing Company. In those same years,
(04:21):
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. There are some sources that describe the
Magnus family as Jewish, but that seems to be an
(04:44):
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. And the timeline on in
all of this is a little bit fuzzy. It's not
clear precisely when Julius started going by that name or
(05:05):
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, so Julius and Clementina left Germany
for England by ship. Then they departed from Hamburg, but
(05:27):
before they left they got married in a civil ceremony.
They arrived in London on October 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 started planning another wedding, this one at a Lutheran church,
officiated by a pastor. And their reasons for doing this
(05:48):
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
didn't consider herself really married without that big church wedding.
On November six, shortly before this second wedding, Julius was
(06:10):
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 Harry 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
(06:32):
employer thought about the fact that he decided to do that.
I imagined 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 widely in that move.
We don't know. But the Sunday after the baptism, Julius
and Clementina got married in the church ceremony. It's still
actually wasn't a very big affair. I referred to it
(06:54):
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 she was still a baby.
By all accounts, Julius and Clementino were a really striking couple.
(07:15):
He was short and 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 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
(07:39):
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 Writer's publishing company off the ground.
It seems like they're 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
(07:59):
partnered with You Also Star Guard to form another publishing
house called star Guard and Reuter. This was once again
not one of Julius's more successful ventures. Years later, Star
Guard accused Reuter of disappearing 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,
(08:21):
but he did offer to repay the money, which some
people interpreted is basically admitting he had done it, while
others interpreted it's just him wanting the issue to be
over with and having the money to do it that way. Yeah,
that's what I call a buy your freedom situation. Yeah,
I want you to leave me alone about this. Here
is some dollars. Additionally, Reuter was publishing pamphlets that were
(08:44):
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
(09:04):
failed to 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. At first,
it seemed as though this revolution was going to be successful,
especially after a number of progressives were installed in the
(09:24):
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, Reuter got
a job at of US News Agency, working as a translator.
(09:46):
Of US News Agency was founded by char Louis 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
and the telegraph would set the stage for Reuter becoming
(10:08):
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
experience so far to try producing and distributing their own publication.
(10:29):
It was essentially a newsletter. It combined stock prices and
news and political goings on, sometimes a little bit of 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
time to leave Paris. The next stop was Achen, which
(10:49):
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 and had
become a thrived in 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,
and Belgium, and that made it an easy connecting point
(11:12):
for travel, trade, and information. This trend and being sort
of a connecting point for all these things continued into
the nineteenth century as an international railway line made its
way through Achen. But then on October one, eight forty nine,
a new telegraph line opened which connected Achen to Berlin.
There was a separate line across the border in Belgium,
(11:35):
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 a hundred forty four kilometers between Brussels
and Achen, so if somebody bridge that gap, they could
connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line, and that's
someone or really those someone's were Julius and Clementina Reuter
(11:58):
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.
Pigeons and doves are in the same family, so some
people note the first documented message sent by pigeon as
(12:22):
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
for an extremely long time. Yes, pigeons were well established
as a way to send messages by this point. Reuter
(12:43):
was just at an ideal spot to make particularly good
use of them. He established the Institute for the Transmission
of Telegraph Messages in Achin and on ap fifty he
signed an agreement with pigeon breeder Iinrich Geller for twenty
five pigeons. Geller also who they rented rooms from when
they first arrived in Aen, and he may have also
(13:04):
invested in their business. So homing pigeons only fly one route,
they fly back home, and in this case home was Akin.
So this whole setup required there to be somebody in
Brussels to get the news from Paris by telegraph and
then transcribe it, loaded up on the pigeon and let
the pigeon go to fly back to Akin. Then in
Akins somebody had to collect the pigeon, retrieve the message
(13:27):
transmitted 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,
including running those pigeons to the train station. It also
required an office in Brussels with pigeons whose home was
(13:50):
there to receive messages from Akin. That side of things
was run by Prussian Army officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Stephen. The
train trip between Akin and Brussels took about ten hours.
By comparison, the average flying speed for a homing pigeon
is roughly sixty miles an hour or ninety six kilometers
an hour, so a pigeon could fly between Brussels and
(14:11):
Knockin in about an hour and a half. 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 Mr.
(14:33):
Reuter's Prices, and the birds were called the Pigeon Post.
It was his first overall successful business, although it was
really built on knowledge he had been gathering since his teens.
He had learned about banking from his uncle, about the
telegraph from Carl Gauss, about pigeons from his work with
the Office News Agency, and about writing and publishing from
(14:53):
various other jobs along the way. Reuter's new business grew
pretty quickly. On July teen fifty, a little more than
three months after they signed their first agreement. Another agreement
transferred all of her Geller's two hundred pigeons over to Reuter.
Reuter's success with the pigeon post wasn't just because of
the ingenuity and hard work that he and Clementina put
(15:16):
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 Rothschild's, while Rothschild's got the Berlin and
Vienna prices only from Reuter, with Reuter otherwise staying off
(15:38):
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. Yes, it wouldn't necessarily be 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
(16:01):
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. A new branch
of the telegraph line opened on October two, eighteen fifty,
connecting Akin to the Belgian city of Vervier. The following March,
(16:22):
another branch of the line connected Vivier 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 gap that needed
to be closed on a telegraph network. Later that same month,
the Reuters closed up shop and Akin and they left.
(16:42):
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, 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,
(17:06):
who had worked on that new telegraph line that ran
from Achen to Vervier. 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 Mr. Reuter,
who's useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the
new electric telegraph. When Mrs Reuter, who accompanied her husband
(17:30):
on the trip, complained to me about this destruction of
their business, I advised the payer to go to London
and to open a telegram agency. They are similar to
that just formed in Berlin by a Mr. Vofe, and
we're going to get back to this Mr 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
(17:53):
Herbert Davies. Reuter's Telegraphic Dispatch Office opened its doors on
October fourteenth that 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 Mr Julius Reuter at Kelis or Ostend.
(18:15):
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
(18:35):
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 towns and stuff. This part of town that they
were in. You needed an umbrella because there were so
(19:00):
many pigeons dropping so many droppings. Reuter didn't own any
of the 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 and receive. Clementina continued to work really
closely with him in this business. She transcribed, she translated
(19:22):
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 moved to London, Clementina got pregnant for
the first time that we know about since the death
of their first child. Their daughter, Julie, a son Herbert Reuter,
(19:43):
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 Dr Davies had helped resolve that problem, and
that may be true. He did, for sure deliver at
(20:06):
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 increasingly 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 it then to be transmitted from a
(20:27):
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 and more of Europe was connected by wire,
(20:49):
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 comeing
into Europe from North America. 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
(21:11):
was by ship. Most of these ships arriving in Europe
docked at Cork, but the first place that they spotted
land was in krick Haven, about seventy five miles or
dred and twenty kilometers southwest. So it took about eight
hours for ships to make this last leg of the
journey from crick Haven to Cork and then dock and
then deliver the news that they had on board. So
(21:32):
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.
Reuters smaller ship would retrieve it, take it back to shore,
and telegraph the dispatch back to London. And there were
ships doing this same thing on the other end of
(21:52):
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 hooking containers off the sides
of boats. I mean they were sending pigeons with trust.
So yeah, so writer did know that eventually there would
be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So
(22:14):
just like the telegraph had closed the gap and made
his pigeon post obsolete, at some point, the same exact
thing was going to happen to his whole crick Haven
message chucking operation. The same was true anywhere else that
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.
(22:38):
He started hiring journalists and editors and started what we'd
recognized today as a wire service, a service that gathered
and reported News and sold it to multiple newspapers. His
first subscriber was The Morning Advertiser in October eight eight.
By that point, Reuter had been in London for seven
years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the
(22:59):
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
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
(23:19):
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.
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,
(23:43):
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.
It's basically like embargoes that still happened today. You can
have this information, but you can't publish your article until
(24:03):
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 agents started transmitting the speech
word for word to London, where it appeared 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
(24:25):
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.
It's also meant that the newspapers that had been like
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,
(24:49):
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 news office in alex Andrea.
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
(25:13):
known as the Provincial press worked out kind of a
complicated pricing scheme among themselves to 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
(25:35):
the Press Association had exclusive rights to Reuter's news outside
of London. The Press Association also agreed not to do
international reporting, leaving that to Reuter's agency, and this also
contributed to Reuter trying 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
(25:56):
that then trickled down. With all of this, we're eating
into his profit margin. These kinds of negotiations were also
happening internationally. By eighteen seventies, three primary wire services were
reporting the news from three different parts of Europe. Reuter
was in England, av US was in France, and Vote,
who we mentioned earlier, was in Germany, And rather than
(26:18):
compete with each other, these three businesses got together to
protect each other's monopolies in different parts of the world.
On January seventeen, eighteen seventy, they agreed that Vote would
be in Germany, a US would be in France, and
Reuter would have the entire British Empire, and this agreement
was in place until nineteen thirty four. Once again, this
(26:40):
arrangement today would probably run a foul of antitrust 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
and the more political arena like the Scramble for Africa,
where countries are basically dividing Africa up amongst themselves. Also,
these three services were intrinsically connected to each other. Julius
(27:04):
Reuter and Bernhard Wolf had both worked as translators for
the of US Agency, which was known in French as
agents of us. 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. That same year, Julius Reuter
(27:25):
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 known as the Reuter Concession, which
(27:48):
gave Reuter the rights to railways, factories, mining, irrigation and
telegraphs in Iran. 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,
(28:10):
in part quote, there has been nothing like it before.
The King of Kings abdicated the functions, if not the
splendor of royalty, and though still gorgeous and glittering, is
unable to make a road, explore a mind, or irrigate
the lands under his dominion. So he calls in an
enterprising financier of the West and offers him many and
(28:31):
precious advantages if he will relieve the Shaw and Shaw
of the real duties of royalty. Meanwhile, Russia, which had
been expanding into neighboring parts of the world, saw this
whole thing is a huge threat and suspected that all
those British officials who were distancing themselves from what Reuter
had done, we're really just trying to cover up their
own involvement in a British power grab. And the people
(28:53):
of Iran were outraged the Shaw was making such huge
concessions to British interests. The Shah reverse 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
(29:16):
from Iran to Brittain twenty years later, and that led
to a huge uprising in Iran. 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
(29:36):
an example from an eighteen eighties three memo to correspondents
written after Julius Reuter's retirement. Quote. In 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
(29:58):
service FI years explosions, floods, in inundations, railway accidents, destructive storms, earthquakes,
shipwrecks attended with loss of life, accidents to war vessels
and to mail steamers, street riots of a grave character,
disturbances arising from strikes, duels between and suicides of persons
(30:22):
of note, social or political, and murders 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. It's a very long way of saying,
if it bleeds, it leads. Reuter retired in eighteen seventy
(30:46):
eight and his son took 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
(31:09):
column printers, teletypes, radio, and satellites. Julius Reuter died at
his mansion of Villa Reuter in Niece, France, on February
It came across the Reuter's wire quote Baron Derouter, the
founder of Reuter's Agency, died at Nice this morning in
his eighty third year. His wife, Clementina, died on August five,
(31:31):
nineteen eleven, in London, and not much as 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 Derouter died in nineteen fifty eight and his
widow died in two thousand nine. But it's clear that
(31:52):
Reuter's could not have become the company that it did
without her, and without her mostly unpaid work. There aren't
even any pictures of Clementina and the Reuters 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, and then
(32:15):
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
as a division of Thompson Reuters after being acquired by
Thompson in two thousand eight. Jens of Us also became
a Jan's France Plus or a f P. Yeah, so
(32:37):
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 Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things where
you think about, uh, Reuter, the man touched so many
(32:57):
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 preparing for this that was about how, um,
not just international news agencies, but domestic news agencies have
(33:20):
a huge effect on culture and on language, because, like,
I mean, you and I for years have used the
Associated Press style guide UM as like that was has
been like the go to style guide at how stuff works,
even though how stuff works has never been strictly a
news reporting thing. Um and like how these style guides
affect what is considered to be correct usage in all
(33:43):
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 continue to reverberate. Do you
have a little bit of listener mail? I do have
listener mail. This is from Charles, and Charles says dear
(34:06):
ms Wilson and MS Fry. I enjoyed your two part podcast,
that is the two part podcast on Sojournal Truth. As
you are aware, the role of slavery pervaded all of
colonial and early federal life. To this end, I'm sending
a link to a Rutgers University magazine describing an internal
investigation on the role of slavery at Queen's College, which
(34:27):
became Rutgers College. As expected, slavery played a role, as
it did in most all early colleges. Note the founder's
family owned BIZ Truth. In her family, there is also
recognition of the acquisition of Native American lands. Although I
don't think we will have a truth and Reconciliation commission
in my lifetime, I'm pleased to see some organizations are
(34:47):
performing these discomforting activities on their own. Your work also
helps make us address these truths. Kind regards Charles, and
he has a link to this article. UM, thank you
Charles for sending this email. I did not know that
there was any connection between the university and so Journal Truth,
but I looked into it and that is absolutely correct.
The Hardenburg family who had been so Journal Truth and
(35:11):
her parents like that whole family. I knew that they
were a very big slave owning family in that part
of New York. I had no idea that they were
among the founders of that university. So thank you so
much for sending us this uh, this email and this link. Charles.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts, where at history podcast at how
stuffworks dot com. We are also all over social media
(35:33):
at Missed in History. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you'll find
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And you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts,
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(35:57):
For more on this and thousands of other topics because
at how staff works dot com
Hey, everybody, we have very exciting news some of you
have heard before. We're gonna talk about it again. We
are going to Paris. We're just gonna keep talking about
it NonStop because the excitement level is off the charts. Yes, uh,
you can come with us, which is the cool part. Uh.
There is information on our website. If you go to
Miston History dot com and you click on the link
(00:21):
in the menu at the top of the page, it
says Paris trip. That's the one it will take you
to all the info. One thing that we wanted to
make sure people know is it if you are a
solo traveler and you're not maybe able to corral friends
to go with you, do not fret. Please go ahead
and sign up because there will be lots of solo
travelers and also we're all one big, happy history family
running around Paris, so you will have plenty of of
(00:42):
opportunities to socialize if you wish, uh, and then plenty
of opportunities to go run away by yourself if you
need downtime. Yes, I know that traveling alone, especially traveling
alone to another country, can be a little intimidating, but
I am a hard core supporter of that it is
something I love to do myself. So regardless of whether
(01:02):
you're traveling with a partner or a friend or by yourself,
everyone is welcome. Also, we've gotten a couple of questions
from folks about whether people from outside the United States
can come on the trip, because the wording on the
website made it sound as though you needed a valid
US passport. It is open to people from other countries
as well, and they are updating that language on the
website and there's contact information. Um, if you go to
(01:25):
our website, we have a link to the Defined Destination's website,
which is where the trip is being coordinated, and there's
contact information there and you can contact them with any
specific questions you have about your travel situation. Yeah, so
we hope you come with us. That's gonna be June
of this year and we're going to have a blast.
Uh So, we hope we see you in Paris. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class from how Stuff
(01:48):
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Trying. 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 Twitter a lot, which is the
(02:10):
opposite of true. It's whenever I opened 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 Twitter thread about pigeons and how cool
(02:32):
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 Reuter's used them to carry stock prices.
And I replied and said, well, now I have to
do a podcast on Paul Julius Reuter, which is where
(02:54):
we are. The man who would later become known as
Julius Reuter was born Israel Beer Yosfat on July twenty one,
eighteen sixteen. He was born near Kassel in the Electorate
of hess Castle, which would later become Prussia and is
now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Josefat, and
he was the third of four children. When the young
(03:15):
Israel was about sixteen, his father died and he was
sent to live with an uncle in Gertingen, 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
Gauss was also in Gertingen, experimenting with electrical signals and
(03:36):
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
Gauss and they struck up an acquaintance. Regardless, though Israel
was fascinated by these experiments, which started in eighteen thirty
In eighteen thirty three, Gauss successfully sent a message over
(03:58):
a wire from his lab um 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
in Berlin called Reuter's Publishing Company. In those same years,
(04:21):
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. There are some sources that describe the
Magnus family as Jewish, but that seems to be an
(04:44):
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. And the timeline on in
all of this is a little bit fuzzy. It's not
clear precisely when Julius started going by that name or
(05:05):
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, so Julius and Clementina left Germany
for England by ship. Then they departed from Hamburg, but
(05:27):
before they left they got married in a civil ceremony.
They arrived in London on October 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 started planning another wedding, this one at a Lutheran church,
officiated by a pastor. And their reasons for doing this
(05:48):
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
didn't consider herself really married without that big church wedding.
On November six, shortly before this second wedding, Julius was
(06:10):
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 Harry 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
(06:32):
employer thought about the fact that he decided to do that.
I imagined 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 widely in that move.
We don't know. But the Sunday after the baptism, Julius
and Clementina got married in the church ceremony. It's still
actually wasn't a very big affair. I referred to it
(06:54):
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 she was still a baby.
By all accounts, Julius and Clementino were a really striking couple.
(07:15):
He was short and 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 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
(07:39):
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 Writer's publishing company off the ground.
It seems like they're 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
(07:59):
partnered with You Also Star Guard to form another publishing
house called star Guard and Reuter. This was once again
not one of Julius's more successful ventures. Years later, Star
Guard accused Reuter of disappearing 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,
(08:21):
but he did offer to repay the money, which some
people interpreted is basically admitting he had done it, while
others interpreted it's just him wanting the issue to be
over with and having the money to do it that way. Yeah,
that's what I call a buy your freedom situation. Yeah,
I want you to leave me alone about this. Here
is some dollars. Additionally, Reuter was publishing pamphlets that were
(08:44):
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
(09:04):
failed to 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. At first,
it seemed as though this revolution was going to be successful,
especially after a number of progressives were installed in the
(09:24):
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, Reuter got
a job at of US News Agency, working as a translator.
(09:46):
Of US News Agency was founded by char Louis 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
and the telegraph would set the stage for Reuter becoming
(10:08):
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
experience so far to try producing and distributing their own publication.
(10:29):
It was essentially a newsletter. It combined stock prices and
news and political goings on, sometimes a little bit of 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
time to leave Paris. The next stop was Achen, which
(10:49):
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 and had
become a thrived in 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,
and Belgium, and that made it an easy connecting point
(11:12):
for travel, trade, and information. This trend and being sort
of a connecting point for all these things continued into
the nineteenth century as an international railway line made its
way through Achen. But then on October one, eight forty nine,
a new telegraph line opened which connected Achen to Berlin.
There was a separate line across the border in Belgium,
(11:35):
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 a hundred forty four kilometers between Brussels
and Achen, so if somebody bridge that gap, they could
connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line, and that's
someone or really those someone's were Julius and Clementina Reuter
(11:58):
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.
Pigeons and doves are in the same family, so some
people note the first documented message sent by pigeon as
(12:22):
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
for an extremely long time. Yes, pigeons were well established
as a way to send messages by this point. Reuter
(12:43):
was just at an ideal spot to make particularly good
use of them. He established the Institute for the Transmission
of Telegraph Messages in Achin and on ap fifty he
signed an agreement with pigeon breeder Iinrich Geller for twenty
five pigeons. Geller also who they rented rooms from when
they first arrived in Aen, and he may have also
(13:04):
invested in their business. So homing pigeons only fly one route,
they fly back home, and in this case home was Akin.
So this whole setup required there to be somebody in
Brussels to get the news from Paris by telegraph and
then transcribe it, loaded up on the pigeon and let
the pigeon go to fly back to Akin. Then in
Akins somebody had to collect the pigeon, retrieve the message
(13:27):
transmitted 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,
including running those pigeons to the train station. It also
required an office in Brussels with pigeons whose home was
(13:50):
there to receive messages from Akin. That side of things
was run by Prussian Army officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Stephen. The
train trip between Akin and Brussels took about ten hours.
By comparison, the average flying speed for a homing pigeon
is roughly sixty miles an hour or ninety six kilometers
an hour, so a pigeon could fly between Brussels and
(14:11):
Knockin in about an hour and a half. 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 Mr.
(14:33):
Reuter's Prices, and the birds were called the Pigeon Post.
It was his first overall successful business, although it was
really built on knowledge he had been gathering since his teens.
He had learned about banking from his uncle, about the
telegraph from Carl Gauss, about pigeons from his work with
the Office News Agency, and about writing and publishing from
(14:53):
various other jobs along the way. Reuter's new business grew
pretty quickly. On July teen fifty, a little more than
three months after they signed their first agreement. Another agreement
transferred all of her Geller's two hundred pigeons over to Reuter.
Reuter's success with the pigeon post wasn't just because of
the ingenuity and hard work that he and Clementina put
(15:16):
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 Rothschild's, while Rothschild's got the Berlin and
Vienna prices only from Reuter, with Reuter otherwise staying off
(15:38):
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. Yes, it wouldn't necessarily be 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
(16:01):
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. A new branch
of the telegraph line opened on October two, eighteen fifty,
connecting Akin to the Belgian city of Vervier. The following March,
(16:22):
another branch of the line connected Vivier 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 gap that needed
to be closed on a telegraph network. Later that same month,
the Reuters closed up shop and Akin and they left.
(16:42):
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, 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,
(17:06):
who had worked on that new telegraph line that ran
from Achen to Vervier. 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 Mr. Reuter,
who's useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the
new electric telegraph. When Mrs Reuter, who accompanied her husband
(17:30):
on the trip, complained to me about this destruction of
their business, I advised the payer to go to London
and to open a telegram agency. They are similar to
that just formed in Berlin by a Mr. Vofe, and
we're going to get back to this Mr 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
(17:53):
Herbert Davies. Reuter's Telegraphic Dispatch Office opened its doors on
October fourteenth that 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 Mr Julius Reuter at Kelis or Ostend.
(18:15):
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
(18:35):
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 towns and stuff. This part of town that they
were in. You needed an umbrella because there were so
(19:00):
many pigeons dropping so many droppings. Reuter didn't own any
of the 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 and receive. Clementina continued to work really
closely with him in this business. She transcribed, she translated
(19:22):
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 moved to London, Clementina got pregnant for
the first time that we know about since the death
of their first child. Their daughter, Julie, a son Herbert Reuter,
(19:43):
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 Dr Davies had helped resolve that problem, and
that may be true. He did, for sure deliver at
(20:06):
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 increasingly 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 it then to be transmitted from a
(20:27):
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 and more of Europe was connected by wire,
(20:49):
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 comeing
into Europe from North America. 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
(21:11):
was by ship. Most of these ships arriving in Europe
docked at Cork, but the first place that they spotted
land was in krick Haven, about seventy five miles or
dred and twenty kilometers southwest. So it took about eight
hours for ships to make this last leg of the
journey from crick Haven to Cork and then dock and
then deliver the news that they had on board. So
(21:32):
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.
Reuters smaller ship would retrieve it, take it back to shore,
and telegraph the dispatch back to London. And there were
ships doing this same thing on the other end of
(21:52):
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 hooking containers off the sides
of boats. I mean they were sending pigeons with trust.
So yeah, so writer did know that eventually there would
be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So
(22:14):
just like the telegraph had closed the gap and made
his pigeon post obsolete, at some point, the same exact
thing was going to happen to his whole crick Haven
message chucking operation. The same was true anywhere else that
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.
(22:38):
He started hiring journalists and editors and started what we'd
recognized today as a wire service, a service that gathered
and reported News and sold it to multiple newspapers. His
first subscriber was The Morning Advertiser in October eight eight.
By that point, Reuter had been in London for seven
years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the
(22:59):
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
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
(23:19):
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.
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,
(23:43):
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.
It's basically like embargoes that still happened today. You can
have this information, but you can't publish your article until
(24:03):
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 agents started transmitting the speech
word for word to London, where it appeared 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
(24:25):
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.
It's also meant that the newspapers that had been like
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,
(24:49):
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 news office in alex Andrea.
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
(25:13):
known as the Provincial press worked out kind of a
complicated pricing scheme among themselves to 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
(25:35):
the Press Association had exclusive rights to Reuter's news outside
of London. The Press Association also agreed not to do
international reporting, leaving that to Reuter's agency, and this also
contributed to Reuter trying 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
(25:56):
that then trickled down. With all of this, we're eating
into his profit margin. These kinds of negotiations were also
happening internationally. By eighteen seventies, three primary wire services were
reporting the news from three different parts of Europe. Reuter
was in England, av US was in France, and Vote,
who we mentioned earlier, was in Germany, And rather than
(26:18):
compete with each other, these three businesses got together to
protect each other's monopolies in different parts of the world.
On January seventeen, eighteen seventy, they agreed that Vote would
be in Germany, a US would be in France, and
Reuter would have the entire British Empire, and this agreement
was in place until nineteen thirty four. Once again, this
(26:40):
arrangement today would probably run a foul of antitrust 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
and the more political arena like the Scramble for Africa,
where countries are basically dividing Africa up amongst themselves. Also,
these three services were intrinsically connected to each other. Julius
(27:04):
Reuter and Bernhard Wolf had both worked as translators for
the of US Agency, which was known in French as
agents of us. 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. That same year, Julius Reuter
(27:25):
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 known as the Reuter Concession, which
(27:48):
gave Reuter the rights to railways, factories, mining, irrigation and
telegraphs in Iran. 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,
(28:10):
in part quote, there has been nothing like it before.
The King of Kings abdicated the functions, if not the
splendor of royalty, and though still gorgeous and glittering, is
unable to make a road, explore a mind, or irrigate
the lands under his dominion. So he calls in an
enterprising financier of the West and offers him many and
(28:31):
precious advantages if he will relieve the Shaw and Shaw
of the real duties of royalty. Meanwhile, Russia, which had
been expanding into neighboring parts of the world, saw this
whole thing is a huge threat and suspected that all
those British officials who were distancing themselves from what Reuter
had done, we're really just trying to cover up their
own involvement in a British power grab. And the people
(28:53):
of Iran were outraged the Shaw was making such huge
concessions to British interests. The Shah reverse 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
(29:16):
from Iran to Brittain twenty years later, and that led
to a huge uprising in Iran. 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
(29:36):
an example from an eighteen eighties three memo to correspondents
written after Julius Reuter's retirement. Quote. In 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
(29:58):
service FI years explosions, floods, in inundations, railway accidents, destructive storms, earthquakes,
shipwrecks attended with loss of life, accidents to war vessels
and to mail steamers, street riots of a grave character,
disturbances arising from strikes, duels between and suicides of persons
(30:22):
of note, social or political, and murders 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. It's a very long way of saying,
if it bleeds, it leads. Reuter retired in eighteen seventy
(30:46):
eight and his son took 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
(31:09):
column printers, teletypes, radio, and satellites. Julius Reuter died at
his mansion of Villa Reuter in Niece, France, on February
It came across the Reuter's wire quote Baron Derouter, the
founder of Reuter's Agency, died at Nice this morning in
his eighty third year. His wife, Clementina, died on August five,
(31:31):
nineteen eleven, in London, and not much as 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 Derouter died in nineteen fifty eight and his
widow died in two thousand nine. But it's clear that
(31:52):
Reuter's could not have become the company that it did
without her, and without her mostly unpaid work. There aren't
even any pictures of Clementina and the Reuters 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, and then
(32:15):
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
as a division of Thompson Reuters after being acquired by
Thompson in two thousand eight. Jens of Us also became
a Jan's France Plus or a f P. Yeah, so
(32:37):
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 Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things where
you think about, uh, Reuter, the man touched so many
(32:57):
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 preparing for this that was about how, um,
not just international news agencies, but domestic news agencies have
(33:20):
a huge effect on culture and on language, because, like,
I mean, you and I for years have used the
Associated Press style guide UM as like that was has
been like the go to style guide at how stuff works,
even though how stuff works has never been strictly a
news reporting thing. Um and like how these style guides
affect what is considered to be correct usage in all
(33:43):
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 continue to reverberate. Do you
have a little bit of listener mail? I do have
listener mail. This is from Charles, and Charles says dear
(34:06):
ms Wilson and MS Fry. I enjoyed your two part podcast,
that is the two part podcast on Sojournal Truth. As
you are aware, the role of slavery pervaded all of
colonial and early federal life. To this end, I'm sending
a link to a Rutgers University magazine describing an internal
investigation on the role of slavery at Queen's College, which
(34:27):
became Rutgers College. As expected, slavery played a role, as
it did in most all early colleges. Note the founder's
family owned BIZ Truth. In her family, there is also
recognition of the acquisition of Native American lands. Although I
don't think we will have a truth and Reconciliation commission
in my lifetime, I'm pleased to see some organizations are
(34:47):
performing these discomforting activities on their own. Your work also
helps make us address these truths. Kind regards Charles, and
he has a link to this article. UM, thank you
Charles for sending this email. I did not know that
there was any connection between the university and so Journal Truth,
but I looked into it and that is absolutely correct.
The Hardenburg family who had been so Journal Truth and
(35:11):
her parents like that whole family. I knew that they
were a very big slave owning family in that part
of New York. I had no idea that they were
among the founders of that university. So thank you so
much for sending us this uh, this email and this link. Charles.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcasts, where at history podcast at how
stuffworks dot com. We are also all over social media
(35:33):
at Missed in History. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where you'll find
a searchable archive of all our episodes ever as well
as the show notes, which are the sources for all
the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together.
And you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts,
the iHeart Radio app, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
(35:57):
For more on this and thousands of other topics because
at how staff works dot com
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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