Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Paul Julius Reuter About this episode This 2019 episode covers Paul Julius Reuter, who had a knack for filling in the gaps in communication systems, and making a lot of money doing so.
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1:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:37 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, very different claim to fame. That was Paul Julius Reuter, who used telegraphs and trains and boats and pigeons to deliver the news.
1:56 Holly Frey? This episode originally came out February 13, 2019. Enjoy.
2:03 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:17 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:18 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.
2:32 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
3:14 Holly Frey? 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-Kassel, which would later become Prussia and is now Germany. His father was Rabbi Samuel Levi Yosefat, and he was the third of four children.
3:33 Tracy V. Wilson? When the young Israel was about 16, his father died, and he was sent to live with an uncle in Göttingen, Germany. His uncle ran a bank, and the plan was for Israel to train there and then to enter the finance industry.
3:47 Holly Frey? At about the same time, physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was also in Göttingen, 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.
4:14 Holly Frey? In 1833, Gauss successfully sent a message over a wire from his lab to an observatory a mile away.
4:21 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.
4:56 Holly Frey? There are some sources that describe the Magnus family as Jewish, but that seems to be an incorrect assumption based on the fact that their home was in Berlin's Jewish quarter. That would have been a logical place for Julius to stay after arriving in Berlin, though, so he and Clementina probably meant, simply because they were living in the same neighborhood.
5:16 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.
5:49 Holly Frey? They arrived in London on October 29, 1845, and they were listed in the passenger manifest as Mr. and Mistress Josefat. 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.
6:24 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 Josephat 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.
6:55 Holly Frey? I imagine that opened some doors for him that he might not have had access to otherwise.
7:00 Tracy V. Wilson? One would think.
7:01 Holly Frey? 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.
7:29 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.
8:01 Holly Frey? But in spite of Clementina's help, Julius wasn't able to get the London branch of Reuter's Publishing Company 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 Stargard to form another publishing house called Stargard and Reuter.
8:22 Tracy V. Wilson? This was, once again, not one of Julius's more successful ventures. Years later, Stargard 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.
8:52 Holly Frey? 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, 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. Reuter's pamphlets and the demonstrators were on the same side.
9:36 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 Reuter's family to leave Germany again. They settled, this time, in Paris.
10:00 Holly Frey? In Paris, Reuter got a job at Avos News Agency, working as a translator. Avos News Agency was founded by Charles Louis Avos, 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.
10:21 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.
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11:53 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
12:38 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
12:48 Speaker 07 Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with IBM's Ana Paula Assis about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI.
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13:25 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1849, 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.
13:52 Holly Frey? 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.
14:20 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 1st, 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 a 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 kilometers, between Brussels and Aachen. So if somebody bridged that gap, they could connect Paris to Berlin along the telegraph line.
14:58 Holly Frey? And that someone, or really those someones, were Julius and Clementina Reuter, who bridged the gap in the line with pigeons.
15:06 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.
15:43 Holly Frey? 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 24th, 1850, he signed an agreement with pigeon breeder Heinrich 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.
16:11 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.
16:39 Holly Frey? 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 Stefan.
17:02 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.
17:29 Holly Frey? Julius Reuter was 34 when he started this venture, which focused on sending stock prices and other financial information. It was known as Mr. Reuter's Prices, and the birds were called the pigeonposts. 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 Avus News Agency, and about writing and publishing from various other jobs along the way.
18:00 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 Reuters.
18:14 Holly Frey? Reuters' success with the pigeon post wasn't just because of the ingenuity and hard work that he and Clementina put into all of this. Reuters 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 Reuters agreed to get London financial information only from Rothschilds, while Rothschilds got the Berlin and Vienna prices only from Reuters, with Reuters 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.
18:54 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."
19:04 Holly Frey? Right.
19:05 Tracy V. Wilson? "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. Reuters 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 Verviers. The following March, another branch of the line connected Verviers 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.
19:47 Holly Frey? And this move was another major change for the Reuters. So we're going to take another pause here for a quick sponsor break.
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20:25 Speaker 00 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. ¿Qué tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
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21:13 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
21:57 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
22:08 Speaker 07 Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I spoke with IBM's Ana Paula Assis about what digital sovereignty actually means in the age of AI.
22:19 Speaker 08 AI now moves from somebody operating a system to the technology actually making decisions. So you have to have a much better visibility of what AI is touching, data it is accessing, and where.
22:35 Speaker 07 Hear the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts.
22:44 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 telecommunications company Siemens, who had worked on that new telegraph line that ran from Aachen to Vrevier.
23:00 Holly Frey? 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. Wolf." And we're going to get back to this Mr. Wolf a little bit later.
23:33 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 14th 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."
24:04 Holly Frey? 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.
24:27 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
25:09 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
25:22 Holly Frey? 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.
26:01 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, Reuter's service forwarding messages to and from the continent was not really as necessary anymore.
26:25 Holly Frey? 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.
26:50 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 onboard.
27:20 Holly Frey? 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. Reuter's smaller ship would retrieve it, take it back to shore, and telegraph the dispatch back to London. And there were ships doing the same thing on the other end of the journey at Nova Scotia.
27:42 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.
27:49 Holly Frey? I mean, they were sending pigeons with trust, so.
27:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. So 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, this 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.
28:20 Holly Frey? 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, Reuters had been in London for seven years and had been naturalized as a British citizen the year before.
28:48 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.
29:11 Holly Frey? The following February 7, 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. Reuters 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.
29:39 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.
29:47 Holly Frey? Yes.
29:48 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 Reuters news service," a bunch of them now got on board. And then, once the war actually started,
30:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Reuters also had reporters embedded with the troops in Austria, France, and Italy.
30:38 Holly Frey? In 1865, Reuters was also the first in Europe to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That same year, he established a news office in Alexandria.
30:49 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. In the process, the provincial papers formed the Press Association to give themselves collective bargaining power with Reuters. They also negotiated a whole deal in which Reuters 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.
31:35 Tracy V. Wilson? And this also contributed to Reuters trying to really diversify the businesses that he was in in the 1880s and 1890s, because the nationalization of the telegraph and all the changes that then trickled down with all of this were eating into his profit margin.
31:49 Holly Frey? These kinds of negotiations were also happening internationally. By 1870, three primary wire services were reporting the news from three different parts of Europe. Reuters was in England, Avast was in France, and Volf, 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 Volf would be in Germany, Avast would be in France, and Reuters would have the entire British Empire. And this agreement was in place until 1934.
32:27 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 Reuters and Bernhard Wolf had both worked as translators for the Avast agency, which was known in French as agence Avast.
33:00 Holly Frey? In 1871, the Duke of Saxco Bergotta made Reuters a baron, and Queen Victoria later recognized his rank in Britain. In 1872, Reuters expanded into East Asia.
33:12 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 Kajr, 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.
33:43 Holly Frey? 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."
34:25 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 that the Shah was making such huge concessions to British interests. The Shah reversed the concession after about a year, but Reuter 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.
35:10 Holly Frey? The Reuters news organization kept expanding over the next decade, becoming known as the largest international news service in the world. Although it was also criticized for unnecessarily graphic coverage, especially during wartime. Here's an example from an 1883 memo to correspondence 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 service.
35:48 Holly Frey? 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."
36:27 Tracy V. Wilson? It's a very long way of saying if it bleeds, it leads.
36:30 Holly Frey? Yes, 100%.
36:32 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 technologies that became sort of part of its pattern of business. It kept adopting faster and better ways of distributing the news as these ways were invented, including using column printers, teletypes, radio, and satellites.
37:01 Holly Frey? Julius Reuter died at his mansion of Villa Reuter in Nice, France, on February 25th, 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."
37:17 Tracy V. Wilson? His wife Clementina died on August 5th, 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
37:59 Tracy V. Wilson? both of them, but there just wasn't enough information about her and then that seemed disingenuous.
38:05 Holly Frey? 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 Thomson in 2008. Agence Havas also became Agence France Presse or AFP.
38:24 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, Wolf did not. It was taken over by Nazis and is, I think, was later totally disbanded.
38:40 Holly Frey? Has its own path, yeah.
38:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
38:42 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's one of those things where you think about, uh, Reuters, 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.
38:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
38:57 Holly Frey? Creating news agencies.
38:58 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 HowStuffWorks, even though HowStuffWorks 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 Reuters himself.
39:40 Holly Frey? Yeah.
39:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
39:42 Holly Frey? Yeah, he's at the, the center of a lot of developments that continue to reverberate.
39:53 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 [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
40:15 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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41:52 Speaker 10 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
42:05 Speaker 11 Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,
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