Paul Reuter

Paul Julius Reuter (born Israel Beer Josaphat; 21 July 1816 – 25 February 1899), later ennobled as Freiherr von Reuter (Baron von Reuter), was a German-born British entrepreneur who was a pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting. He was a reporter, media owner, and the founder of the 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, Electorate of Hesse (now part of the Federal Republic of 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 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.