Paul Reuter

For more information on Paul Julius Reuter, Baron von Reuter, visit Britannica.com.

Communications pioneer Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899) exploited the crude technology of the telegraph to create one of the world's first international news services. The news agency he founded, Reuters, established the model for transmitting news quickly around the world. It has remained one of the most effective, innovative and respected communications outlets.

Reuter was born on July 21, 1816 in Kassel, in the Electorate of Hesse in Germany. His Jewish parents named him Israel Beer Josaphat. As a young man he worked as a clerk at his uncle's bank in Gottingen, Germany. At the bank he became acquainted with Carl Friedrich Gauss, a well-known mathematician and physicist who was a pioneer at applying mathematical theory to electricity and magnetism. At the University of Gottingen, Gauss was a professor and director of the observatory. Gauss was experimenting with the electric telegraph, and Josaphat developed a keen interest in telegraphy. Josaphat began to consider how to use the new technology to improve communications throughout the world.

In October 1845, Josaphat moved to England, where he at first called himself Joseph Josaphat. Within a few weeks he converted to Christianity and, at his baptism on November 16, 1845, took the name Paul Julius Reuter during a ceremony at St. George's German Lutheran Chapel in London. Seven days later, Reuter married Ida Maria Elizabeth Clementine Magnus at the same church.

Bridging the Gap

Reuter soon returned to Germany. In 1847 he became a partner in a Berlin bookshop, Reuter and Stargardt, and joined a small publishing company. Reuter published several political pamphlets that provoked the wrath of German authorities. Under pressure from German leaders, he moved to Paris in 1848.

In Paris, Reuter began translating newspaper and business articles into German and dispatching short excerpts to Germany. This news agency failed after several months due to tight regulations by the French government. He then worked in Paris as a translator for the Havas news agency.

By 1850, Reuter was back in Germany, where he founded another news agency at Aachen. In April 1850, he entered into an agreement with Heinrich Geller to start a carrier pigeon service to transmit news and stock prices between Aachen, where German telegraph lines ended, and Belgium. Although his service was known as a "pigeon-post," he used both central telegraphic transmission and carrier pigeons. The service operated for a year until the telegraphic gap between the two nations was closed.

In June 1851, Reuter moved back to London with his family and soon became a naturalized British citizen. On October 10, 1851, he established a telegraph office at the I Royal Exchange Buildings, near the London stock exchange. From this location he transmitted stock market quotations between London and Paris, using the new Calais-Dover telegraph cable under the English Channel. Recognizing the need for a news service, Reuter spent the next seven years working hard to build the agency and promote his services to newspapers. At first, most of his work was confined to commercial telegrams. In 1858 he convinced the London Times and several other English papers to subscribe to his service and publish his news dispatches. Soon his news agency, known as Reuters, became indispensable to the British press.

International Success

Reuter rapidly built a strong reputation for his service by reporting several exclusive stories. In 1859 he transmitted the text of a speech given by Napoleon III prior to the Austro-French Piedmontese war in Italy. The agency soon extended its service to include the entire British press. Reuter's continuing successes brought him to the attention of the highest levels of government. In 1861 Reuter was presented at the Court of Queen Victoria by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston.

On April 26, 1865, Reuters was the first news agency to bring the news of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination in the United States to the European public. Later that year, Reuter opened the first news agency office outside of Europe in Alexandria, Egypt. With his services rapidly expanding throughout Europe, Reuter laid his own telegraph cables across the North Sea to reach Germany and France. Reuters then began to serve the United States. By 1872 the agency reached the Far East, and in 1874 it expanded into South America.

As the world of news transmission grew, Reuter found himself battling with two main competitors, the Havas agency of France and Wolff of Germany. On January 17, 1870, after many years of rivalry, Reuters and its competitors set ground rules for the worldwide exchange of news by dividing up turf. The territorial divisions allowed Reuters, Havas and Wolff exclusive control over their own countries and assigned to each of them parts of Europe and South America. For many years, the three agencies enjoyed a shared monopoly on global news service.

In 1871, Reuter was named a baron by the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Later he was given the same rank in England. Reuters converted his news agency into a joint stock company, and he remained its managing director until 1878, when he retired and was replaced by his son Herbert.

Foresaw the Future of News

Even after his retirement, Reuter remained active as the news agency he founded continued to grow and flourish. In 1883, Reuter began transmitting messages electrically to London newspapers using a column printer - an early version of a "news wire" or "ticker" which would become a common feature in newsrooms worldwide.

Reuter's sense of the importance of clear, concise and timely dissemination of the news is summed up in an 1883 memo he dispatched to his correspondents and agents. In the memo he requested that news be transmitted that included "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." With this memo he established the ground rules which future news agencies followed.

Reuter died on February 25, 1899, at his mansion, the Villa Reuter, in Nice, France. His company continued to build on his initial success after his death. In 1923 Reuters pioneered the use of radio to send news internationally. In 1925 the British press agency, the Press Association, took charge of a majority holding in Reuters, Ltd. In 1941 the Reuter Trust was formed to ensure the neutrality and independence of Reuters. On February 25, 1999, the Reuters News Agency commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of its founder by launching a university award in Germany.

Books

Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, 1993.

Julius Reuter and His Son Herbert Reuter, Reuters News Pictures Service, 1999.

Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1995.

Online

"An 1883 memo," Reuters History,http://about.reuters.com/investormedia/company-info/memo.asp (December 11, 2000).

"Foundation and early development," Reuters History,http://about.reuters.com/investormedia/company-info/history.asp (December 11, 2000).

"Milestones in the life of Paul Julius Reuter," Reuters History,http://about.reuters.com/investormedia/company-info/milestones.asp (December 11, 2000).

"Reuter, Paul Julius, Baron (Freiherr) von," Britannica.com,http://britanica.co..b/article/9/0,5716,64949+1,00.html (November 24, 2000).

"Reuter, Paul Julius, Baron von," Microsoft Encarta On line Encyclopedia 2000,http://encarta.msn.com (November 17, 2000).

Professor and director of the Master School for Violin at the Vienna State Academy of Music. His mother developed automatic writing, receiving messages in seventeen languages, many of them being evidential in character and often coming in mirror writing. In The Psychic Experiences of a Musician (1928), von Reuter gave a full analytical account of these phenomena.

His second book The Consoling Angel (1930), narrated the receipt of automatic-writing messages from a school friend of his mother's, including over three hundred proofs of identity, all dealing with matters totally unknown to von Reuter and his mother. Ernesto Bozzano considered the book to be one of the most evidential publications of the time.

A third book, A Musician's Talks with Unseen Friends (1931), is a record of automatic scripts received by von Reuter alone, dealing with ethical and philosophical matters, and given (as in the case of William Stainton Moses) by a band of communicators.

Later von Reuter and his mother also developed direct voice and received apport phenomena in their own circle. Von Reuter lectured on psychic matters all over Germany and the British Isles. He was associated with Baron von Schrenck-Notzing in a series of experiments with the Schneider brothers.

Sources:

Reuter, Florizel von. A Musician's Talks with Unseen Friends. London: Rider, 1931.

Paul Reuter aged 53 years (1869) by Rudolf Lehmann

Statue of Paul Reuter in the City of London

Paul Julius Freiherr von Reuter (Baron De Reuter) (July 21, 1816 – February 25, 1899) was a German entrepreneur and later naturalized British citizen. The pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting^[1], was a journalist and media owner, and the founder of the Reuters news agency.^[2]

Biography

He was born in Kassel, Germany to a Jewish family^[3]. His father was a rabbi. His birthname was Israel Bere Josafat. In Göttingen Reuter met Carl Friedrich Gauss who experimented with the transmission of electrical signals via wire.

On 29 October 1845, he moved to London, where he called himself Joseph Josephat. On November 16 he converted to Christianity during a ceremony at St. George's German Lutheran Chapel in London^[4] and changed his name to Paul Julius Reuter. One week later on November 23, he married Ida Maria Elizabeth Clementine Magnus in Berlin. After the failed Revolution of 1848, he fled from Germany and went to Paris and worked there in Charles-Louis Havas' news agency, the future Agence France Presse. While telegraphy evolved, Reuter first founded the Reuters News Agency in Aachen which transferred messages between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons. This was the missing link to connect Berlin and Paris. The carrier pigeons were much faster than the post train, giving Reuter faster access to stock news from the Paris stock exchange. In 1851, the carrier pigeons were superseded by a direct telegraph link.^[5] A telegraph link was established between Britain and the European continent through the English Channel. This link was extended to the south-western shore of Ireland, at Cork in 1863. There ships coming from America threw canisters containing news into the sea. The news was telegraphed to London, arriving before the ships.

In 1851 Reuter moved back to London and set up an office at the London Stock Exchange. Reuter founded Reuters, one of the major financial news agencies of the world. On 17 March 1857, Reuter was naturalised as a British subject, and on September 7, 1871, the German Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha conferred a barony (Freiherr) on Julius Reuter. The title was "confirmed by Queen Victoria as conferring the privileges of the nobility in England".^[6]

Baron de Reuter had two sons, George, 3rd Baron de Reuter, and André Reuter. His only daughter, Clementine Maria, married Count Otto Stenbock, and after his death, Sir Herbert Chermside, a governor of Queensland.^[7] George, 3rd Baron de Reuter had two sons, Oliver, 4th Baron de Reuter, and Ronald Reuter. The last member of the family, Marguerite, widow of the 4th baron, died on January 25, 2009.^[6]

Paul Reuter died in Villa Reuter, Nice, France, and was buried in the family vault at West Norwood Cemetery in London.

Edward G. Robinson portrayed Reuter in the Warner Bros. biopic A Dispatch from Reuter's (1940).

On February 25, 1999, the Reuters News Agency commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of its founder by launching a university award (Paul Julius Reuter Innovation Award) in Germany.^[4]

The last surviving member of the Reuters family, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, who was Paul Reuter's granddaughter-in-law, died in 2009 at the age of 96.^[8]

References

1. ^ Paul Julius Reuter: a Dictionary of World History 2000
2. ^ Paul Julius Reuter - the founder of Reuters
3. ^ Paul Reuter - Britannica Student Encyclopaedia
4. ^ ^{a b} Encyclopedia of World Biography 2004
5. ^ Standage, T. The Victorian Internet (1999)
6. ^ ^{a b} Baroness Reuter, last link to news dynasty, dies
7. ^ ADB - Sir Herbert Chermside
8. ^ "Baroness de Reuter, last link to news dynasty, dies". Reuters (ABC News (Australia)). 2009-01-26. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/26/2474298.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-21. 

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