Sticking With The Pigeon

A little story about technology and the reluctance to change

Resistance to the new is as old as the new itself. There are countless illustrations but I recently came across a lovely new one — new to me, that is — of how people tend to almost instinctively stick to what they know.

Since time immemorial, news spread at the speed of whatever the fastest means of physical transport happened to be. In 1815, the Battle of Waterloo ended in a British victory on a Sunday evening. By the following afternoon, Wellington had written his soon-to-be-famous dispatch and Major Henry Percy carried it from Belgium back to London as quickly as he possibly could. That meant horse, sloop, rowboat, then finally a horse-drawn carriage with captured French eagles sticking out the windows. He delivered the grand news late Wednesday night.

Paul Julius Reuter built a business on moving information faster than anyone, and when he started that meant sending news via carrier pigeon. (Yes, today’s Reuters News Agency was founded on trained pigeons. Insert joke about journalists here.)

But Reuter followed the development of the telegraph closely and he put it to creative use. One of Reuter’s brainstorms saw him install his own telegraph line between London and the most south-westerly point in Ireland. When a ship from the Americas sailed to London, it passed close by the Irish coast, so Reuter arranged to have someone onboard put the latest news from America in a canister. The canister was chucked overboard. Reuter’s employees retrieved it and telegraphed its contents to London — ensuring the news arrived well before the ship.

It’s hard today to even imagine how radically the telegraph changed the world. String a wire between any two places and news could travel faster than the gods, violating speed barriers that had been as constant as gravity itself. By the late 1840s, when telegraphy was a tested, proven technology, anyone whose business relied on timely information should have clamoured to be connected to the magical new device. Or so one would think.

But when the ambitious Paul Julius Reuter first arrived in London in the early 1850s, and offered London editors news at a speed that Mercury himself could not match, he was met with skepticism. Editors had been getting Reuter’s news via pigeon. They thought the pigeons were doing a bang-up job. Why switch to this new contraption?

Here’s an account written in 1895.

Reuter, a specialist in news gathering and distribution by means of carrier pigeons, before the adoption of wire telegraphy, was one of the first to realize the importance of the discovery when it came. He did away with carrier pigeons where possible, but for months he was unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade London editors to use his telegraphic news. Finally, by supplying a month’s service free, so that comparisons might be made … he succeeded in introducing his system. It illustrated the common reluctance to take up improvements.

The author of that account is Guglielmo Marconi. Today, Marconi is known as the inventor of radio, which he really wasn’t. What he was was a gifted entrepreneur who took a nascent technology, advanced it, and turned it into an enormously influential global business.

One reason for Marconi’s success is that he understood from the outset that a technology’s success is not determined solely by the technology. People must adopt it. And people being people, that can be the most challenging part.