Enter Heinrich Geller - stage right

It was New Year’s Day 1850.

Like millions of others throughout the world, the citizens of Aachen in Prussia awoke to the knowledge that they would soon be lucky enough to be entering the second half of the 19th century - the greatest of all centuries. For some, an only too close awareness of the deplorable over-crowding and insanitary conditions within a town still mainly confined within its mediaeval walls may have directed their minds towards more practical matters. But whether set against the great abstractions or the parochially practical, there is little doubt that the fact that another small business had recently opened in the town went virtually unnoticed. Trading as the Institute for the Transmission of Telegraph Messages, it was operated by Herr Julius Reuter, a small dark-haired man from the German Electorate of Hesse, and Clementine, his larger, blonde wife.

Those of a slightly more curious nature who chatted to the couple were able to piece together that they were endeavouring to offer a three-way service for businesses and newspapers. The service would deliver news and stock prices to and from Berlin, Vienna and Paris, via such telegraph lines as existed and otherwise by the railways and postal services. Two newspapers, Kolnische Zeitung at the terminus of the railway line in Cologne and L’Independance Belge of Brussels, were probably their first newspaper subscribers. The editor of the latter has been credited with giving Reuter a tip-off about starting in Aachen. It was probably the two Reuters who inspired a paragraph in March 1850 reporting the establishment of “a general correspondence bureau” at Aachen which offered “at moderate charge, important news and stock-market prices” to the press and finance houses of Belgium, France and England. “Unusually and interestingly”, the paper commented, this news was being delivered to Aachen “by telegraph”.

The key phrase here is “by telegraph” and it is these words which made this a story for the paper’s readers. There is no mention of the word “pigeons” and there wouldn’t be, although it seems almost certain that the Reuters were already making use of them. Pigeons were not unusual and had been used as message-carriers for centuries. On an ad hoc basis, their use would have been taken for granted. Pigeons were not news. Unlike a new application of the electric telegraph they were definitely not “second half of the 19th century”.

It is at this point that the next “[fairy] godfather” in our story steps out into the limelight, in the very real and substantial form of Heinrich Geller, brewer, baker, lodging house keeper and pigeon breeder. How the Reuters first made his acquaintance is not known. His name may have been suggested to them before they came to the town. But it seems that as soon as they arrived in Aachen he befriended the young couple and initially offered them a room at his house at 117 Pontestrasse. There is also a suggestion that he lent them some money and thus acquired a financial stake in their fledgling business. When, some weeks later, they rented a room at the Hotel Schlembach near the railway station (which may have been purely their office), he acted as financial guarantor. On 24 April 1850 he made an agreement with Reuter to provide a total of 45 trained birds for service between Brussels and Aachen. Twelve birds were to be always available at Brussels; all birds were to be returned by train each day to Brussels, ready to fly back the next day. Things went well and the Reuters must soon have made more than enough money to cover the daily transport of the birds to Brussels because, on 26 July, Geller further agreed to assign all his pigeons (over 200) to Reuter’s use.

Reuter locked his Aachen subscribers in his office when market-moving price information was expected by pigeon so that all received the information at the same time

There was, of course, an equivalent service using Brussels-based birds flying in the other direction, and the Brussels end of operations appears to have been handled for the Reuters by a Prussian army officer, Lieutenant Wilhelm Steffen. Steffen later moved to the United States and fought on the northern (Unionist) side during the Civil War. Passport records tell us that he arrived from Cologne at the great Brussels coaching inn, The Hotel Grand Miroir, on 25 April 1850, the day after Reuter signed his agreement with Geller in Aachen. His journey will have brought him through Aachen and it seems probable that he was actually present when Reuter signed his agreement with Geller and had discussed operational details before continuing on to Brussels.

We have, however, only oral tradition on which to base the statement that at the Brussels end the nerve centre was La Cygne, the famous inn which still survives in the Grand Place. Well-known as an important terminus in the days of carrier pigeon networks, it provided many birds for many different routes, including to and from London. The Reuters’ small Institute will have been but one of many customers taking advantage of the services offered and the sky above the Grand Place must have been dark with pigeons during the late 1840s. To be without an umbrella anywhere near La Cygne was to court disaster!

In later years, the story was often told (and never denied) of how Reuter locked his Aachen subscribers in his office when market-moving price information was expected by pigeon so that all received the information at the same time. No doubt there is truth in this but we also know that in April 1850 he wrote to the Rothschilds banking firm in London offering them a deal under which, if they would pay to receive the Berlin and Vienna prices from him, he would make no further involvement in London. So, where necessary, he was prepared to bind himself to exclusivity. Reuter and his wife were still living in a financially precarious way. They needed money and they needed to eat. Geller, Steffen, the railway company and La Cygne had to be paid. The extremely high monopolistic charges of the Prussian State Telegraph needed to be recouped. Principles had to come second.

On 2 October 1850, the telegraph line between Aachen and Verviers in Belgium was opened. By 15 March 1851, the Belgian telegraph network reached from Ostend to Verviers and connected with the Prussian network. Once again, the livelihood of the Reuters had vanished - but not quite. They had some capital, probably not a great deal, from their Aachen venture and perhaps on the strength of this Reuter seems to have secured some backing from the Erlangers, a Jewish banking family firm from Frankfurt who had also converted to Lutheranism.

On a March day in 1851, Aachen awoke to find that the Reuters had vanished. A “Closed” sign hung on the door of the Institute for the Transmission of Telegraph Messages. The couple may, very briefly, have transferred to Brussels but what we definitely know is that in June they sailed from Ostend to London, arriving on the 14th. For three months they elude us. The inevitable lodgings had to be organised (did they, again, go back to somewhere in Bury Street? Probably). During that most exciting of London summers they are bound to have visited, perhaps more than once, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The money seems to have held out because, on 14 October, they opened an office consisting of two small, dark rooms at 1 Royal Exchange Buildings (later pulled down and re-built) near the London Stock Exchange. With Reuter styling himself Director of Electric Telegraph and, as always, sharing the work (if any) of their Telegraphic Despatch Office between them, the couple were taking a serious financial gamble that the world’s very first undersea cable, then being laid between Dover and Calais and connecting the British capital with those of Europe, would actually work.

A month later, on 13 November, successful cross-channel transmissions began.

Clementine was five months pregnant.

PHOTO: Advertisement placed by Paul Julius Reuter on the front page of The Daily News on 13 October 1851, the eve of his opening a Telegraphic Despatch Office in two rooms at No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, London. ■