Paul Julius Freiherr von Reuter (Baron von Reuter;] 21 July
1816 – 25 February 1899) was a German-born, British entrepreneur who was a
pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting. He was a reporter and media owner, and the
founder of Reuters News Agency, which became part of the Thomson Reuters conglomerate
in 2008.
Life and career
Reuter was born as Israel Beer Josaphat in Kassel, Germany.
His father, Samuel Levi Josaphat, was a rabbi. His mother was Betty Sanders. In
Göttingen, Reuter met Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was experimenting with the
transmission of electrical signals via wire.
On 29 October 1845, he moved to London, calling himself
Julius Josaphat. On 16 November 1845, he converted to Christianity in a
ceremony at St. George's German Lutheran Chapel in London, and changed his name
to Paul Julius Reuter. One week later, in the same chapel, he married Ida Maria
Elizabeth Clementine Magnus of Berlin, daughter of a German banker.
A former bank clerk, in 1847 he became a partner in Reuter
and Stargardt, a Berlin book-publishing firm. The distribution of radical
pamphlets by the firm at the beginning of the 1848 Revolution may have focused
official scrutiny on Reuter. Later that year, he left for Paris and worked in
Charles-Louis Havas' news agency, Agence Havas, the future Agence France
Presse.
As telegraphy evolved, Reuter founded his own news agency in
Aachen, transferring messages between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons
and thus linking Berlin and Paris. Speedier than the post train, pigeons gave
Reuter faster access to financial news from the Paris stock exchange.
Eventually, pigeons were replaced by a direct telegraph link.
A telegraph line was under construction between Britain and
Europe, and so Reuter moved to London, renting an office near the Stock
Exchange. In 1863, he privately erected a telegraph link to Crookhaven, the
farthest south-west point of Ireland. On nearing Crookhaven, ships from America
threw canisters containing news into the sea. These were retrieved by Reuters
and telegraphed directly to London, arriving long before the ships reached
Cork.
In 1872, Nasir al-Din Shah, the Shah of Iran, signed an
agreement with Reuter, a concession selling him all railroads, canals, most of
the mines, all the government's forests, and all future industries of Iran.
George Curzon called it "The most complete and extraordinary surrender of
the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has ever
been dreamed of". The Reuter
concession was immediately denounced by all ranks of businessmen, clergy, and
nationalists of Persia, and it was quickly forced into cancellation.
On 17 March 1857, Reuter was naturalized as a British
subject. On 7 September 1871, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha granted him the
noble title of Freiherr (Baron). In
November 1891, Queen Victoria granted him (and his subsequent male-line
successors) the right to use that German title (listed as "Baron von
Reuter") in Britain.
Marriage and children
In 1845, Reuter married Ida Maria Magnus, daughter of
Friedrich Martin Magnus, a German banker in Berlin. They had three sons:
Herbert, who became the 2nd Baron (succeeded by his son Hubert as 3rd Baron),
George and Alfred. Clementine Maria, one
of his daughters, married Count Otto Stenbock, and after Stenbock's death, Sir
Herbert Chermside, a governor of Queensland.
The 2nd Baron's brother George had two sons, Oliver (who
became the 4th Baron) and Ronald. The last member of the family, Marguerite,
Baroness de Reuter, widow of the 4th Baron and Paul Julius Reuter's
granddaughter-in-law, died on 25 January 2009, at the age of 96.
Death and
commemoration
Reuter died in 1899 at Villa Reuter in Nice, France. He was
buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London.
Reuter was portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in the Warner
Bros. biographical film A Dispatch from Reuter's (1941).
The Reuters News Agency commemorated the 100th anniversary
of the death of its founder by launching a university award (the Paul Julius
Reuter Innovation Award) in Germany.
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