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"The name ‘Reuter’ appears daily in thousands of newspapers and upon thousands of screens all over the world. Enduring and universal awareness of the name has earned it a place in the language as well as in history." (p.1)
"For over a hundred years, from its foundation in 1851, Reuters was a national and imperial institution, the news agency of the British Empire. Paradoxically Reuter had been born a German Jew. In the mid-twentieth century the British Empire faded away, and Reuters might have faded with it. Instead, the old news agency saved itself by making a bold new start. During the past thirty years it has transformed itself from a national into an international institution, even though its headquarters remain in London. This transformation has been linked to the revolution in communications technology made possible by the transistor and the microchip. Computerized economic news and information—prices, trade figures, reports—are supplied on screen to business people working increasingly within a global economy. Thanks especially to the success of Reuters in providing such economic news, the company’s profits have grown dramatically during the 1980s. In 1980 pre-tax profits were £3.9 million: in 1989 they were £283.1 million. This very large increase made possible a heavy investment in expansion. As part of the process, the numbers of Reuters staff worldwide grew from 2,894 in 1980 to more than 10,000 in 1989.
By that year over 90 per cent of current revenue was coming from products designed for the financial community. In a sense, the wheel had turned full circle, for in 1850 Reuter used carrier pigeons to forward stock-market and commodity prices from Brussels, where the Belgian telegraph line ended, to Aachen, where the German line began. In 1851 he moved to London, the financial centre of the Victorian world, and there launched his telegraph agency. By the end of the 1850s he had found success by establishing a standard for news gathering and distribution. Reuter had set out to be ‘first with the news’, and often was. But above speed he placed accuracy, and alongside accuracy he set impartiality in news distribution. He was to be less clearly successful in achieving objectivity in news reporting." (pp.1-2)
"The present-day company knows that worldwide recognition of its independence in management and reporting, regardless of governmental or other pressures, is vital for its continuing progress as an international organization. In this knowledge Glen Renfrew, managing director 1981-91, said firmly: ‘in an international company the Reuter people leave their patriotism at home. The longer they work abroad the more they begin to appreciate all the countries they work in.’ The 1988 edition of the Reuter International Style Guide, produced for internal circulation, spelt out the old tradition to the latest generation of Reuter journalists. It reiterated the continuing need for accuracy, speed, and objectivity. ‘Reuters does not comment on the merit of events . . . one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.’." (p.2)
"Julius Reuter was never primarily himself a reporter. He was a great news entrepreneur. During the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century news was becoming an opportunity commodity. If Reuter had lived two generations earlier, in late eighteenth-century England, he might well have dealt in cotton, the opportunity commodity of the industrial revolution. If he had been in business in the early twentieth century, he might well have become an oil-man. He chose news as his interest because in his day it was becoming marketable as never before. On the one hand, the public demand for news was growing fast. On the other, technology was advancing to meet and encourage that demand." (p.5)
"The future Julius Reuter was born at Cassel, near the centre of Germany, into a Jewish family on 21 July 1816. He was the third and youngest son of Samuel Levi Josaphat, and was given the names ‘Israel Beer’. The Josaphats were a well-educated and well-respected family. Reuter’s obituary in the Jewish Chronicle of 3 March 1899 remembered that his grandfather, Loeb Witzenhausen, had been judicial rabbinical adviser to the local Jewish community at Witzenhausen, and had been influential with the Government of Hesse-Cassel. However, the years before the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 had brought great disturbance to the area, and led Reuter’s father, Samuel, to move his family from Witzenhausen to Cassel. At the time of his son’s birth, Samuel was acting chief rabbi of Cassel. His eldest son, Gerson, was also to become a rabbi and a notable Talmud scholar. Two of Reuter’s cousins became university professors.
Reuter’s father died in 1829 ; but his mother, Betty, about whom little is known except that she came from Cassel, survived until 1858. His attachment to her, and indeed to his whole family, was recalled by the Jewish Chronicle as ‘one of the many excellent traits of his character’. Reuter was to help several of his relations financially in the years of his prosperity. At the start of his career, however, it was his family that helped him. His father had died leaving little money; and the boy was sent from Cassel to join the bank of his uncle Benfey at Géttingen. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century Reuter’s many relatives were thus dividing their interests between religion, scholarship, and business. Opportunities for Jews outside their own communities were opening up—witness the success of the Rothschilds. Prejudice, although never entirely removed, was diminishing. Some of Reuter’s family remained strict in their practice of the Jewish faith; others became more relaxed.
Young Reuter stayed in the Géttingen bank for several years. Géttingen is a university town, and during the 1830s Professor Karl Friedrich Gauss, known as the founder of modern mathematics, was conducting pioneering experiments in sending electric signals by wire. One story, told in later years, described how Reuter had collected a bag of 30 louis d’or from Gauss at home to be credited to his account at the bank. On his way to the bank Reuter found that Gauss had mistakenly given him double louis d’or (in other words twice the amount). He rushed back to point out the professor’s mistake. The master mathematician took some convincing, but was eventually persuaded of his error. Struck by Reuter’s honesty and intelligence, Gauss then befriended the young man, and initiated him into the mysteries of electric telegraphy. Another later story claimed that Gauss himself had been little interested in the practical application of his discoveries about magnetism. Young Reuter, on the other hand—who attended Gauss’s lectures, and may have acted as his unpaid assistant—realized that a system of telegraphy would transform world communications. Reuter foresaw that men would soon be exchanging messages at the speed of electricity, without any need for physical proximity." (pp.5-7)
"The world’s first telegraphic patent was taken out by Cooke and Wheatstone in England in 1837. Three years later Samuel Morse in the United States patented his dot-and-dash code for telegraphic use. The first commercial application of telegraphy was to pass train information along railway lines. On 6 August 1844 the first news received by telegraph appeared in the British press: a telegram from Windsor Castle announced the birth of Queen Victoria’s second son. News need no longer be delivered at the speed of the horse, or even the new railway —and perhaps not even at the speed of the new steamships. For in 1846 Wheatstone suggested that a submarine telegraph cable could be laid from Dover to Calais.
The news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 had taken four days to reach London; the news of his death at St Helena six years later had taken two months to reach England by sea. From the 1840s such delay was ceasing to be necessary, as telegraph lines started to spread across the British Isles, Europe, and the United States. By 1862 the world’s telegraph system was approaching 150,000 miles in length—some 15,000 miles in the British Isles, 80,000 on the Continent, 48,000 in North America.
Telegraphy was soon big business, in the hands either of Governments or of major companies. In England the Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1846, and the English (later British) and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company in 1852. The grand new offices of the latter company, opened in Threadneedle Street in 1859 with the names of the continents spelt out on the frontage, reflected the contemporary sense of space and time being conquered by telegraphy." (p.7)
"Reuter was destined to become a major domestic customer of the British telegraph companies during the 1850s and 1860s. Twenty years earlier, however, he was still trying to make his way in Germany. After Gottingen, he seems to have moved through a succession of jobs in various German cities, but the evidence is confused. He was clearly unsettled, and this may well have been a factor in his decision to give up both his Jewish surname and his Jewish faith. He was never to be ashamed of his Jewish origins, but he saw no reason why his career should be restricted by his Jewishness. Many other Jews were coming to the same conclusion.
At the same time he got married—apparently twice over—to Ida Maria Elisabeth Clementina Magnus, the daughter of a Prussian bureaucrat. The couple seem to have been first married in Berlin on 25 October 1845. They then travelled to London: ‘Julius Josaphat’ was recorded as entering England on 29 October. On 16 November he was baptized in the name of ‘Paul Julius Reuter’ at St George’s German Lutheran Chapel, Whitechapel, London. On 23 November, at the same chapel, he again went through a ceremony of marriage with Ida. Perhaps the couple thought it prudent to do so in view of their change of surname.
Why choose the name ‘Reuter’ ? Traditional explanations are of a pun on Reiter (‘rider’ or ‘messenger’). Yet in 1845 Reuter was not in the news business. Perhaps he chose the name of a friend in England. The London directory for that year listed just one person with the surname—Simon Reuter, a wool merchant, and later a subscriber to his namesake’s news service. Julius may indeed have been involved in the wool trade in 1845, for some of his family had connections with it. The certificate of aliens described him as a Kaufmann (‘merchant’). On the other hand, Julius may have chosen the name Reuter simply because it was a common German surname, and he wanted to be accepted as entirely German. If so, it was ironic that he made it so familiar to the world only after he had become a British subject.
On this first occasion, however, the Reuters did not remain long in England. Whatever Julius’s current business may have been, it did not prosper in London, and the young couple returned to the Continent. Their marriage was set to bring them lasting happiness. Julius and Ida were largely opposites, both in physique and temperament. While Julius was small, dark, keen of eye, succinct in conversation, Ida was buxom, blonde, sensitive, and discursive. But both were energetic and good with people. Ida’s day-to-day involvement in the business was to be essential to her husband during the struggles of the next few years. Their first child, a daughter born in July 1846 and baptized a Christian, lived for only three weeks. No other children have been recorded until a son, Herbert, was born in London in 1852. Two daughters and one further son followed." (pp.7-
-Donald Read, The power of news. The history of Reuters (1849-1989), Oxford University Press, 1992, 431 pages.
