Paul Reuter

Paul Julius Reuter

by Saleh

            Paul Julius Reuter was born in Germany in 1816. He is an interesting person for his connection to the telegraphy systems used in Europe during the 19^th Century because he combined the telegraph system with the news of the day in a very interesting way. The company that he started still exists as the Reuters News Agency and it is famous all over the world.

Although Reuter was born in Germany, he became a British citizen but then did most of his work in France so he was really an international person. His work also had an international character to it.  In his first job, Reuter worked in the translation business. The work that business translated was news stories from different European newspapers. Those stories were taken from the newspapers and translated into different languages and then the stories were sent to different countries all over the world. Reuter figured out that people were interested in some kinds of stories more than others and that in some cases they were even ready to pay money for translated stories.

Once he figured out that people would pay for translated stories, he made his own company to translate the stories. The translation part was easy as long as his company had the news but how to send the translations to different places as fast as possible was the problem. At first, Reuter bought many carrier pigeons that were sent with the translations attached to their legs. The first business of this kind that he did was by sending the pigeons from Aix-la-Chapelle to Brussels. After that he set up a network of offices for the pigeons to go to all over Europe. The people in the different places got the news as fast as the birds could fly there.

Reuter, as a good businessman, saw the opportunity that he could have if he used the electric telegraph in his news business. He still sent his pigeons with the news but started to also send messages about the news by telegraph. This made the sending of the news even faster than the pigeons could fly to places with it. With this new addition of the telegraph, the news that was sent was mostly about business and trade.

After 1860, the Reuter company made a lot of money selling news stories to European newspapers because they were so happy to get the news so fast. In some cases, the newspapers that were far away from the action taking place had stories within an hour or two of it happening. For example, during a war in Europe, the newspapers all over the continent were able to have different accounts of the fighting from different sides all in an hour after the fighting had stopped.

Once the transatlantic cable was completed in 1858, this kind of news was able to be sold to America and American news was able to be sold in Europe. The Reuters news agency grew thanks to the invention of the telegraph and this news agency today is still one of the most successful international news agencies in the world.

Source: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/paul-julius-reuter/