Paul Julius Reuter

Paul Julius Reuter, 1869

Paul Julius Reuter , from 1871 Freiherr von Reuter ( Baron Reuter ; born July 21, 1816 in Kassel , Electorate of Hesse ; † February 25, 1899 in Nice ; actually Israel Beer Josaphat ) was a German entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of the news agency “ Reuters Telegraphic Comp. Incorporated ".

Life

It was in 1816, the son of from Witzenhausen coming Jewish trader and Rabbi Samuel Levi Josaphat and his wife Betty, born Sanders, born. He grew up in the old town of Kassel. His birthplace was on the corner of Druselgasse and Mittelgasse. In Kassel he began a commercial apprenticeship, became a banker , met the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in Göttingen , who supported the physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber in his experiments that were a prerequisite for the development of electrical telegraphy . In 1840 Josaphat moved to Berlin , in 1845 he converted to Christianity in London : he was baptized in the German-Lutheran St. George's Church and took the name Paul Julius Reuter.

Statue of Paul Julius Reuter in London

In Berlin he married the banker's daughter Ida Maria Magnus. He bought into a respected publishing house with a bookstore - "Reuter and Stargardt ". By publishing democratic writings during the failed bourgeois revolution of 1848/49 , Reuter in Berlin was threatened; he evaded the access of the Prussian police by emigrating to Paris .

Commemorative plaque on the founding house of the Reuters news agency in Aachen, Pontstrasse 117

While telegraphy was developing, Reuter founded a news agency in Aachen in 1850 , which broadcast news between Brussels and Aachen with carrier pigeons. This was the missing link between Berlin and Paris. The carrier pigeons were much faster than the stagecoach, so Reuter had faster access to news from the Paris Stock Exchange. In 1851 the carrier pigeons were replaced by a telegraph line.

A telegraphic link was also established between Great Britain and the continent through the English Channel. In 1863 the line was extended to the port city of Cork in south-west Ireland. Ships arriving from America threw canisters with messages overboard as they passed the coast. Fished out of the water, taken to Cork and telegraphed on, the news reached London before the ships . This gave Reuters news transmission another decisive time advantage. After the development of telegraphy, he provided all the major cities in the world with his own correspondents and agencies and ultimately had his own corporation, Reuters Telegraphic Comp. Incorporated via a news monopoly. In 1871, Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha raised him to the hereditary nobility of baron . Two decades later, the British Queen Victoria gave him the title of baron .

In 1872 he received from Naser al-Din Shah a concession for the economic development of Persia, which included the exclusive right to build all railways and dams, to regulate rivers for agricultural use and to exploit natural resources (with the exception of gold and silver mines) . Reuter was also given preferential treatment with regard to a concession to build banks and factories of all kinds. However, Reuter was unable to raise the capital required to implement this concession after the British government refused to provide a corresponding financial guarantee for the investments in Persia. The concession was revoked in 1873 because of protests by Russia. In return, Julius Reuter received a concession to found the Imperial Bank of Persia , which, in addition to its general activity as a commercial bank, also issued Persian banknotes until the founding of an Iranian central bank.

In 1940 William Dieterle shot a biography with Edward G. Robinson as Paul Julius Reuter under the title A Dispatch from Reuters ( A Man with Fantasy ) .

The Paul Julius Reuter Innovation Award was launched on the 100th anniversary of the death of the company founder Paul Julius Reuter on February 25, 1999 at the University of Siegen . The Paul Julius Reuter School in his birthplace Kassel is named after him. The Paul Julius Reuter Vocational College in Aachen bears his name.

literature

• Gerd Kulle et al .: Paul Julius from Reuter. Global news pioneer . Kassel meets, Kassel remembers in the Stadtsparkasse. Deutscher Sparkassenverlag, Stuttgart 1978.
• Ludwig Julius Fränkel:  Reuter, Paul Julius Freiherr von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 53, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1907, pp. 319-321.
• Stefanie Schuschmel: From Aachen into the world: Paul Julius Reuter (1816–1899) . In: Paul Thomes, Peter M. Quadflieg (ed.): Entrepreneurs in the Aachen region - between the Maas and the Rhine . Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3-402-13107-7 , pp. 132–152.

Web links

• Paul Julius Reuter Innovation Award
• Paul Julius Reuter - the most printed name of all time
• Literature by and about Paul Julius Reuter in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Encyclopedia of World Biography 2004
2. ^ Rouhollah K. Ramazani: The foreign policy of Iran. University Press of Virginia, 1966, pp. 66ff.
3. ↑ Paul Julius Reuter Innovation Award 2006 ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ History of the Reuterschule Kassel ( Memento of the original from February 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ^ Paul-Julius-Reuter-Vocational College, Aachen