To carry the news
Don Coldsmith
Monday, December 15, 2008
SOMETIMES it’s pretty depressing to watch the evening news on TV. So many bad things are always happening, all over the world. Natural disasters like floods, droughts, earthquakes — things like murders which involve only a few people, but deeply affect the rest of us when we hear about it — we might even say because we hear about it. A century ago, news moved more slowly. Unless it was a particularly graphic event such as Lizzie Borden’s destruction of her parents via an axe, we’d never have heard the news.
Today, electronic devices transport news so quickly that we know almost instantly. Anybody else notice that we had the first news stories of Princess Diana’s tragedy before she was even extricated from the car in Paris?
Possibly, even, things are no worse than they ever were, world wide. We just hear more about it, and sooner. We wouldn’t want to return to a few decades ago, when it took a month or more to receive news from Paris, I guess, but it’s a thought. Those WERE simpler times and maybe it was more comfortable not to learn about national and international tragedies and crises until after they were past.
But, there’s always been a longing, a craving, maybe, to know what’s happening elsewhere. I was reading recently that in ancient Greece the results of the Olympics were transmitted to other parts of the world by homing pigeons. Pigeons were used 3,000 years ago in Egypt and in Persia to carry messages about military and political situations. Homing pigeons can find their way back to the home loft from a thousand miles away in a couple of days, apparently navigating by earth’s magnetic field.
A brief note here — HOMING pigeons, not “carrier” pigeons. Carriers are so named for the proud way they carry themselves. They’re show pigeons and nobody even cares whether they can find their way home after the show. Homers have been used until modern times, in World War II and the Korean War. The US Army Signal Corps did not deactivate the homing pigeon until 1956. An interesting sidelight — in World War II, both Germany and the United States experimented with trained falcons to catch each other’s pigeons.
But back to news services — our newspapers depend a lot on the Associated Press, New York Times News Service and to a lesser extent, United Press International. News from Russia is carried by Tass, that from China by New China News, and Europe depends heavily on Agence France Presse. (They have strange phonetics in France). In Britain and other English-speaking countries, the old dependable Reuters (pronounced “Roy-ters”) News Agency is the big one, along with Associated Press.
Reuters has an interesting background. The agency was founded by Paul Julius von Reuter, a German baron, born in 1816. He was fascinated by the dissemination of news and attempted to start an agency in Paris without much success. But the telegraph was coming into use and Reuter noticed that there were gaps between the terminal offices of Belgium, France and Germany. There must be a way, he figured, to link the information network together without stringing a wire across miles of mountains. His answer, homing pigeons! He set up a “pigeon post” to complete the network, which was used largely as a financial news service connecting the capitals of Europe. He moved to London in 1858 and expanded the operation.
The American Civil War was of world-wide importance, and the Reuters agency, with reporters on the front lines, began to achieve a lot of respect. He was still using pigeons to some degree, even with the telegraph, the high-tech system of its day.
There’s a story, which I haven’t been able to verify, that Reuters “scooped” every other news agency in Europe by a day or two with the news of Lincoln’s assassination. It was done by means of a combination of techniques. Transoceanic news was carried by mail on ships, but Reuter had stationed agents on islands in the trade route, armed with homing pigeons. A semaphore signal from a passing ship could be relayed by pigeons and could cut a day or two off the time required to carry the news. High-tech for its time!
See you down the road.