SYMHC Classics: Paul Julius Reuter

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class – SYMHC Classics: Paul Julius Reuter

Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Frey
Original Airdate: February 13, 2019 (rebroadcast December 27, 2025)
Podcast Provider: iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the remarkable life and legacy of Paul Julius Reuter—the founder of Reuters, one of the world’s most influential news organizations. The hosts, Tracy and Holly, explore how a German-born entrepreneur expanded the boundaries of news transmission by embracing cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions, from pigeons to telegraphs, shaping the modern media landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Life and Influences

• Birth and Background: Born Israel Beer Yosefat on July 21, 1816, in Kassel (then Hesse-Kassel, later Prussia, now Germany). (04:21)
• Family and Childhood: His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Yosephat; third of four children. After his father's death at 16, Israel moved to Göttingen to live with his uncle, a banker, and was expected to enter finance. (04:40)
• Exposure to Technology: In Göttingen, possibly met mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was experimenting with electrical telegraphy, sparking Israel’s fascination. (04:54)

2. Transformation and New Beginnings

• Name Changes: At age 25 (~1841), Israel adopted the name Julius, likely after his birth month; later, after marriage and baptism as a Lutheran in London, he became Paul Julius Reuter. (05:28, 07:32)
• Marriage: Married Ida Maria Elizabeth Clementina Magnus (often called Clementina)—an educated and active partner in his ventures. (05:28–06:23)
• Migration and Challenges: Faced business setbacks in both publishing and finance, prompting repeated moves between Germany, London, and Paris. (06:56–09:30)
  • Example: Accused by business partner Josef Stargardt of financial impropriety but repaid disputed money (09:30).
  • Published then-radical democratic pamphlets during the 1848 revolutions, but political tides soon forced the family to flee to Paris. (10:03–10:43)

3. From Pigeon Post to Telegraph Empire

• Experience at Avas News Agency: In Paris, worked at the pioneering news agency Avas, blending news translation with the use of pigeons and telegraphs. (11:07)
• Entrepreneurial Turn in Aachen: Relocated to Aachen, strategically at Europe’s crossroads, just as new telegraph lines left a crucial 90-mile gap between Aachen and Brussels. (16:30–17:36)
• Innovation: The Pigeon Post: Julius and Clementina bridged this gap with homing pigeons, rapidly transmitting financial information like stock prices, notably outpacing trains by hours. (17:44–20:07)
  • Notable Quote:

    “A pigeon could fly between Brussels and Aachen 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.”
    — Tracy V. Wilson (19:40)

• Business Savvy: Secured exclusive deals with Rothschilds, agreeing to mutually beneficial market limitations that would be illegal today. (20:52–21:32)

4. London and the Birth of Reuters

• Closure of the Pigeon Gap: Expansion of telegraph lines made pigeons obsolete; Siemens recommended moving operations to London. (21:32, 26:54)
  • Notable Quote:

    "The owner of the pigeon post between Cologne and Brussels, a Mr. Reuter, whose useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the new electric telegraph."
    — Werner von Siemens, quoted by Holly Fry (27:10)

• Establishing the Reuters Agency: In 1851, opened Reuters Telegraphic Dispatch Office near the London Stock Exchange, transmitting news and business messages across Europe. (27:43–28:13)
• From Message Forwarder to News Powerhouse: As telegraph proliferation made basic transmission services ubiquitous, Reuter pivoted towards news gathering and distribution, eventually creating what would become a wire service. (30:11–32:06)

5. Major Breakthroughs and Expansion

• First Wire Subscriber and Notorious “Scoops”:
  • First client: The Morning Advertiser in 1858. (32:30)
  • Napoleon III Speech Scoop ([33:21]–[34:48]):
    • Reuters got the full text of a diplomatic speech—on potential war—telegraphed to London ahead of all competitors, cementing its reputation.
    • Notable Moment:

      "When Napoleon did start giving [the speech], the French agent started transmitting the speech word for word to London, where it appeared... just a couple hours after it had been delivered."
      — Tracy V. Wilson (33:49)

  • Reported Lincoln’s assassination first in Europe. (34:48)
• War Reporting: Embedded reporters with troops during the Second Italian War of Independence, pioneering battlefield reporting. (34:48)
• Legal and Industry Impact: Faced shifting landscapes due to the British government's nationalization of the telegraph, leading to industry-wide alliances and eventual creation of the provincial Press Association. (34:59–35:59)

6. International Agreements and Controversies

• News Trust Monopolies:
  • In 1870, Reuter, AVAS (France), and Wolff (Germany) carved up territories, each maintaining their respective national monopolies. (35:59–36:37)
  • Parallels drawn with the "Scramble for Africa" and international political deals.
• The Iranian Concession Disaster:
  • In 1872, Reuter secured sweeping industrial, economic, and infrastructural concessions in Iran—sparking outrage, political embarrassment, and eventual revocation due to local and Russian opposition. (37:22–38:35)
  • Notable Quote:

    "There has been nothing like it before. The King of Kings abdicated the functions... of royalty... and offers him many and precious advantages if he will relieve the Shah... of the real duties of royalty."
    — Editorial in The Times (37:53)

7. Legacy and Lasting Influence

• Succession and Later Life: Elevated to baron by Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (recognized by Queen Victoria); retired in 1878, succeeded by son Herbert. Julius died in 1899; Clementina died in 1911. (41:10–41:27)
• Role of Clementina: Repeatedly highlighted her pivotal but under-acknowledged role—a working partner, translator, and assistant, without whom Reuters could not have succeeded. (08:37–09:09, 41:27)
• Modern Echoes: The Reuters news agency remains a central player in world media. AVAS evolved into AFP; Wolff’s agency did not survive WWII. (42:15–42:50)
  • Thoughtful Reflection:

    "He basically like destabilized huge parts of Iran in addition to his savvy in the business world, creating news agencies."
    — Holly Fry (42:50)

• Cultural and Linguistic Impact: News agencies (Reuters, AP, etc.) influence not just reporting, but language and culture—referencing style guides as standard-bearers for usage beyond journalism. (43:08)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On pigeons and technology:
  “Pigeons are the oldest domesticated birds, and people have been using them...for carrying messages...since ancient Rome.” – Tracy (17:44)
• On business adaptation:
  "Reuter did know that eventually there would be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So just like the telegraph had closed the gap and made his pigeon Post obsolete, at some point the same thing was going to happen..." – Tracy (32:06)
• On modern relevance:
  “He’s at the center of a lot of developments that continue to reverberate.” – Holly (43:51)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 04:21 – Early life and family origins
• 07:32 – Name change and move to England
• 10:43 – Paris era and Avas News Agency
• 16:30–20:07 – Aachen, pigeon post, “Mr. Reuters Prices”
• 21:32–22:25 – Emergence of telegraph networks, business migration
• 26:54–28:13 – Establishing Reuters in London
• 32:30–34:48 – Landmark news scoops (Napoleon III’s speech, Lincoln’s death)
• 35:59–36:37 – Antitrust-like industry agreements
• 37:22–38:35 – The Iranian concession debacle
• 41:10–41:27 – Retirement and end of Reuter’s life
• 42:15–43:08 – Reuters legacy, influence on style and language

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Tone and Style

The hosts maintain a conversational, witty, and insightful tone, navigating the complexities of 19th-century business, politics, and technology, while highlighting both the historical significance and quirky human moments. There is a recurring theme of adaptation, resilience, and the interplay between ethics and enterprise.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a vivid portrait not only of Paul Julius Reuter’s resourcefulness and significance in global news history, but also of the often overlooked partnership of Clementina Reuter. The story traces the transformation of information—from hand-carried letters and pigeons, through networks of telegraphs, to the building blocks of the present-day wire services. The legacy of Reuter endures, not just as a business success, but as a testament to technological adaptation and the often complicated ethics of ambition.

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For listeners, this episode provides a rich mix of international intrigue, technological gadgetry, business maneuvering, and the eternal race to deliver the news first.

Transcript

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Happy Saturday. This week's episode on Joseph Medill made me think about another figure from the history of journalism, although with a very claim to fame. That was Paul Julius Reuter, who used telegraphs and trains and boats and pigeons to deliver the news.

[Holly Fry]

This episode originally came out February 13, 2019. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We have kind of an accidental theme in the episodes 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 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 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, now I have to do a podcast on Paul Julius Reuter, which is where we are.

[Holly Fry]

The man who would later become known as Julius Reuter was born Israel beer yosefat on July 21, 1816. He was born near Kassel in the electorate of Hesse Castle, which would later become Prussia and is now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Yosephat, and He was the third of four children.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

When the young Israel was about 16, his father died and he was sent to live with an uncle in Gttingen, Germany. His uncle ran a bank and the plan was for Israel to train there and then to enter the finance industry.

[Holly Fry]

At about the same time, physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was also in Gttingen, 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 Gauss and they struck up an acquaintance. Regardless, though, Israel was fascinated by these experiments, which started in 1830. In 1833, Gauss successfully sent a message over a wire from his lab to an observatory a mile away.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1841. When he was about 25, Israel started going by a new name, which was Julius. It was probably after his birth month of July. And in the early 1840s he also left the world of banking and started working at a publishing house in Berlin called Reuters 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 met simply because they were living in the same neighborhood.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And the timeline on all of this is a little bit fuzzy. It's not clear precisely when Julius started going by that name or when he met Clementina. But in 1845, Reuters 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 before they left, they got married in a civil ceremony.

[Holly Fry]

They arrived in London on October 29, 1845, and they were listed in the passenger manifest as Mr. And Mistress Yosephat. 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 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

On November 6, 1845, shortly before the 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 Yosephat to Reuter. Once again, there's no documentation of what led him to this name change, but it did mean that he was Herr 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 after the baptism, Julius and Clementina got married in a 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 1846, they had a daughter named Julie, although unfortunately she died while she was still a baby.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By all accounts, Julius and Clementina were a really striking couple. 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 assistant to an unpaid partner, depending on exactly what was needed.

[Holly Fry]

But in spite of Clementina's help, Julius wasn't able to get the London branch of Reuters Publishing Co. Off the ground. It 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 Josef Stargardt to form another publishing house called Stargardt and Reuters.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This was once again, not one of Julius's more successful ventures. Years later, Stargardt accused Reuter of disappearing from the 1848 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.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, that's what I call a buy your freedom situation.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I want you to leave me alone about this. Here is some dollars. 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 1848 and 1849. It was driven by an economic depression that included high unemployment and food shortages. Peaceful protests 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. Reuters pamphlets. And the demonstrators were on the same.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Side 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 1849, conservatives would be back in control, and all of this together led the Reuters family to leave Germany again. They settled, this time in Paris.

[Holly Fry]

In Paris, Reuter got a job at Avas News Agency, working as a translator. Avas News Agency was founded by Charles 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This combination of news and pigeons and the telegraph would set the stage for Reuter becoming a household name in the world of international news. We will get to that after a sponsor break.

[Holly Fry]

Listen to your elders, honey. You might know them from their viral videos, but now the Old Gays pull back the curtain on their Podcast and Silver Linings with the Old Gays Brought to you in partnership with I Hearts, Ruby Studio and Veiv Healthcare For a very special bonus episode. Hosts Robert, Mick, Bill and Jahsay talk about how pride has evolved over the years and their favorite memories, all in celebration of Palm Springs Pride because Pride should be celebrated all year round. Listen to these fabulous friends swap stories exploring how queer life has evolved over the decades and the silver linings they've collected along the way. Each episode dives into hot topics from safe sex and online dating to untangling Gen Z lingo, as well as insights on how music, art and fashion show up in queer culture. So check out Silver Linings, a show about how Pride ages like fine wine, available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Foreign. Julius and Clementina Reuter combined all their 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 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 1849, they decided it was time to leave Paris.

[Holly Fry]

The next stop was Aachen, which is near the current border between Germany and Belgium. Aachen had come to prominence in the 8th and 9th 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 and Belgium. And that made it an easy connecting point for travel, trade and information.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This trend in being sort of a connecting point for all these things continued into the 19th century as an international railway line made its way through aachen. Then, on October 1, 1849, a new telegraph line opened which connected Aachen to Berlin. There was a separate line across the border in Belgium, and that line was the French Belgian line that ran from Paris to Brussels. So Aachen was on one side of this gap in the line. The gap stretched about 90 miles, or 144 km between Brussels and Aachen. So if somebody bridged that gap, they could connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line.

[Holly Fry]

And that someone, or really those someones, were Julius and Clementina Reuter, who bridged the gap in the line with pigeons.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 aachen. And on April 24, 1850, he signed an agreement with pigeon breeder einrich Geller for 25 pigeons. Geller is also who they rented rooms from when they first arrived in Aachen. And he may have also invested in their business.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So homing pigeons only fly one route. They fly back home, and in this case, Home was Aachen. So this whole setup required there to be somebody in Brussels to get the news from Paris by telegraph and then transcribe it, load it up on the pigeon and let the pigeon go to fly back to Aachen. Then in Aachen, 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.

[Holly Fry]

So running this operation in Aachen 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 there to receive messages from Aachen. That side of things was run by Prussian army officer Lieutenant Wilhelm Steffen.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The train trip between Aachen and Brussels took about 10 hours. By comparison, the average flying speed for a homing pigeon is roughly 60 miles an hour, or 96 kilometers an hour. So a pigeon could fly between Brussels and Aachen 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.

[Holly Fry]

Julius Reuter was 34 when he started this venture, which focused on sending stock prices and other financial information. It was known as Mr. Reuters Prices, and the birds were called the 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 Carl Gauss, about pigeons from his work with the Avis News Agency, and about writing and publishing from various other jobs along the way.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Reuters new business grew pretty quickly. On July 26, 1850, a little more than three months after they signed their first agreement, another agreement transferred all of Herr Geller's 200 pigeons over to Reuter.

[Holly Fry]

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 1850, he got in touch with Rothschilds in London to sign an exclusive business deal in which Reute agreed to get London financial information only from Rothschilds, while Rothschilds got the Berlin and 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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, like 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. A new branch of the telegraph line opened on October 2, 1850, connecting Aachen 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 15, 1851, there was no longer a gap that needed to be closed in the telegraph network. Later that same month, the Reuters closed up shop in Aachen and they left.

[Holly Fry]

And this move was another major change for the Reuters. So we're going to take another pause here for a quick sponsor break. Listen to your elders, honey. You might know them from their viral videos, but now the old Gays pull back the curtain on their podcast Silver Linings with the Old Gays. Brought to you in partnership with I Hearts, Ruby Studio and Veiv Healthcare. For a very special bonus episode, hosts Robert, Mick, Bill and Jahsay talk about how pride has evolved over the years and their favorite memories, all in celebration of Palm Springs Pride. Because pride should be celebrated all year round. Listen to these fabulous friends swap stories exploring how queer life has evolved over the decades and the silver linings they've collected along the way. Each episode dives into hot topics from safe sex and online dating to untangling Gen Z lingo, as well as insights on how music, art and fashion show up in queer culture. So check out Silver Linings, a show about how pride ages like fine wine, available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rob Gronkowski]

This is Rob Gronkowski from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and jules. For the second season in a row, I partnered with T Mobile's Friday night 5G lights, powering up hometown football across America. This year, T mobile invested over $4 million in prizes to help schools take their Friday nights to the next level. The votes are in. And now it's time to crown our $1 million grand prize winner. Congratulations to Derrick's High school and Derrick's Arkansas, home of the Outlaws and your 2025 T mobile Friday night 5G lights champion. The Outlaws and their community rallied to help them score a game changing home field upgrade. A Gronk fitness weight room makeover, an epic 2026 tailgate party and a VIP trip to the SEC Championship game. To every school that competed, posted and rallied your communities. Thank you and to T Mobile for making it all possible. This season may be over, but the story isn't. Stay tuned for season three in 2026. Congratulations again to Derek's High School Outlaws.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

After leaving Aachen, 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 Aachen to Vervier.

[Holly Fry]

Siemens later wrote of meeting them in Aachen, 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, whose useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the new electric telegraph. When Mrs. Reuter, who accompanied her husband on the trip, complained to me about this destruction of their business, I advised the pair to go to London and to open a telegram agency there, similar to that just formed in Berlin by a Mr. Wolff. And we're going to get back to this Mr. Wolff a little bit later.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The Reuters arrived in London in October of 1851. They got rooms near the London Stock Exchange and they lodged there with a doctor named Herbert Davies. Reuters Telegraphic Dispatch office opened its doors on October 14 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 Mr. Julius Reuter at Calais or Ostend.

[Holly Fry]

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 increasing telegraph lines connecting various parts of Europe.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, 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 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 messages coming into and leaving the office. Eventually they were making enough money to hire a messenger boy, which was 11 year old Fred Griffiths, who would eventually work his way up to becoming a director in the company.

[Holly Fry]

Not long after their move 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, was born on March 10, 1852. 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 least some of the children, but he didn't specialize in obstetrics, which was still a relatively new field at the time.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 lone telegraph office that was out there. So over time, Reuters service forwarding messages to and from the continent was not really as necessary anymore.

[Holly Fry]

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, it leveled the playing field. But before the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed In August of 1858, speed was still key to making money from news coming into Europe from North America.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 docked at Cork, but the first place that they spotted land was in Crookhaven, about 75 miles, or 120 kilometers southwest. So 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.

[Holly Fry]

So Reuter employed small, fast boats at Crookhaven. Once the incoming vessel carrying the news caught sight of shore, someone 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 the journey at Nova Scotia.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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.

[Holly Fry]

I mean, they were sending pigeons with trust. So, yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Reuter did know that eventually there would be an underwater cable connecting Europe to North America. So 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 Crookhaven message chucking operation. The same was true anywhere else that he was able to get an edge by being faster than his competition.

[Holly Fry]

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 first subscriber was the morning advertiser in October 1858. By that point, Reuter had been in London for seven years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the year before.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Reuters big break came in 1859 with a speech made by Napoleon III. 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 implied that France might be headed toward a war with Austria.

[Holly Fry]

The following February 7th, Napoleon III 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. 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Very curious about how he did that, but I do not know the answer. It's basically like embargoes that still happen 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 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 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.

[Holly Fry]

In 1865, Reuter was also the first in Europe to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That same year, he established a news office in Alexandria.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1868, Britain started nationalizing the telegraph service, which really affected Reuters business and the news industry as a whole. Reuters, the London newspapers and the regional newspapers, 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 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 Reuters News outside of London. The Press association also agreed not to do international reporting, leaving that to Reuters Agency. And this also contributed to Reuter trying to really diversify the businesses that he was in the 1880s and 1890s. The nationalization of the telegraph and all the changes that then trickled down with all of this were eating into his profit margin.

[Holly Fry]

These kinds of negotiations were also happening internationally. By 1873, primary wire services were reporting the news from three different parts of Europe. Reuter was in England, Avas was in France, and Wolff, 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 of the world. On January 17, 1870, they agreed that Wolf would be in Germany, Avos would be in France, and Reuter would have the entire British Empire. And this agreement was in Place until 1934.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Once again, this arrangement today would probably run afoul of antitrust laws in 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 to each other. Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolff had both worked as translators for the AVAS agency, which was known in French as agents AVAs.

[Holly Fry]

In 1871, the Duke of Saxe Coburg Gothe made Reuter a baron, and Queen Victoria later recognized his rank in Britain. In 1872, Reuters expanded into East Asia.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 Nasser Al Din, Shah Khajar, was making a series of concessions to British interests. He signed what was known as the Reuter Concession, which gave Reuter the rights to railways, factories, mining, irrigation, and telegraphs in Iran.

[Holly Fry]

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 kings abdicated the functions, if not the splendor of royalty, 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 Shah in shah of the real duties of royalty.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 Shah was making such huge concessions to British interests. The Shah reversed the concession after about a year, but Reuters still had interests in Iran. This revised agreement with the Shah 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 20 years later, and that led to a huge uprising in Iran.

[Holly Fry]

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 during wartime. Here's an example from an 1883 memo to correspondence written after Julius Reuters retirement quote, in consequence of the increased attention paid by press to disaster, etc. 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 fires, explosions, floods, 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 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

It's a very long way of saying if it bleeds, it leads.

[Holly Fry]

Yes, 100%.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Reuter retired in 1878 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 technology 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 and satellites.

[Holly Fry]

Julius Reuter died at his mansion of Villa Reuter in Nice, France on February 25, 1899. It came across the Reuters wire quote. Baron de Reuter, the founder of Reuters agency, died at Nice this morning in his 83rd year.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

His wife Clementina died on August 5, 1911 in London. And not much is 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 Reuter died in 1958 and his widow died in 2009. But it's clear that Reuters 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 in 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 that seemed disingenuous.

[Holly Fry]

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 Thomson Reuters. After being acquired by Thompson in 2008, a Gens Avas also became Agence France Presse or AFP.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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, Volf did not. It was taken over by Nazis and is, I think was later has its own dispanded.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where you think about Reuter. The man touched so many things that continue 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, and we really didn't get into it here, but I read an interesting article preparing for this that was about how not just international news agencies, but domestic news agencies have a huge effect on culture and on language. Cause 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 Stuff works has never been strictly a news reporting thing, and like how these style guides affect what is considered to be correct usage in all kinds of contexts, even when they're not strictly journalism contexts. It was super interesting, but also not totally related to Reuter himself.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's at the center of a lot of developments that continue to reverberate.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcastheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. At cvs, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night, and we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At cvs, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So Visit [e-mail] or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But but first, There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Rob Gronkowski]

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[Holly Fry]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract worth $250,000. This is where mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.

[Holly Fry]

Pressure is coming down. Trainer Games on Prime Video January 8th. Watch the trailer on trainergames.com this is.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

An I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.