Publishing

Advice and reports on all things related to digital publishing.

Paul Julius Reuter founded the agency on carrier pigeons between Aachen and Brussels in 1850, and when Thomson Corporation bought Reuters for 17 billion dollars in 2008 not a single direct descendant held a journalism job to attend the announcement

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A serene image of two pigeons soaring in the blue sky, showcasing the freedom of flight.

Reuters is not a newspaper, has never owned a printing press, and began life as a flock of homing pigeons. In 1850 the birds carried closing stock prices across the roughly 76-mile gap between Aachen and Brussels, the point where the German and French-Belgian telegraph lines stopped short of each other. Paul Julius Reuter set … Read more

By the time the last Bombe was dismantled at Eastcote in 1959, around 211 of the bronze-drummed machines had been built and every one was broken up for scrap on Churchill’s orders, leaving the women who had operated them legally forbidden from explaining to their husbands what they had done during the war.

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A reflective woman poses elegantly with a typewriter in a black and white setting, evoking nostalgia.

By 1959, the last of them were gone. Around 211 Bombe machines had been built to break the German Enigma cipher, and on Winston Churchill’s orders every one was eventually reduced to scrap—drums, relays, miles of wiring, the whole apparatus melted down for the metal. The women who had spent their war running these machines … Read more

Octopuses taste with their suckers using about 10,000 chemoreceptor cells in each sucker, while most of their 500 million neurons sit in their arms, letting a detached arm reach, grasp, and reject food for nearly an hour after separation

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Vibrant octopus swims gracefully in Barcelona aquarium, showcasing marine life.

The arm is already moving when the dish lid comes off, curling, probing, pressing suckers against the glass, then pulling back from a taste it does not want. The octopus it belonged to is no longer attached. The central brain is no longer sending commands. The arm still has enough nervous system inside it to … Read more

In 1879, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped a bright Martian patch as Nix Olympica, the Snows of Olympus, not realising the albedo mark sat over a shield volcano about 370 miles wide that Mariner 9 would finally resolve through dust 92 years later

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Resource Hubs: For more long-form science features, browse the Growth List blog. For weekly newly-funded startup data, see Growth List. In 1971, NASA’s Mariner 9 slipped into orbit around Mars in the middle of a planet-wide dust storm and waited. When the dust began to thin, the first high places to show through were the … Read more

When Galileo’s magnetometer detected a wobble in Europa’s magnetic field in January 2000, the only explanation that fit the data was a salty global ocean sloshing beneath roughly 15 kilometres of ice, and that single measurement is the reason the spacecraft was later sacrificed to protect it.

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Resource Hubs: For more long-form features from the Growth List Team, browse our features archive. Funding data referenced throughout is sourced from Crunchbase and the primary mission archives cited inline. Most planetary missions end with a controlled burn into empty space or a quiet drift toward the heat death of the solar system. Galileo did … Read more

Concorde’s nose drooped on landing because at the angle of attack required to keep its delta wing aerodynamic below 250 knots, the pilots could not physically see the runway, a problem British and French engineers solved in 1965 by hinging the entire forward fuselage on hydraulic rams.

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🗺 Part of the Growth List Startup Lists Collection All Startup Lists | By Funding Stage | Sales Outreach | Startup Intelligence At Mach 2 the nose of Concorde was a needle, a long tapered fairing built to slip through a supersonic shockwave with as little drag as possible. On final approach into Heathrow that … Read more

Before Eagle rose from the Sea of Tranquility on 21 July 1969, Michael Collins had spent about 27 hours alone in Columbia, circling behind the Moon in 47-minute radio silences while preparing for the possibility that Armstrong and Aldrin never came back

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Resource Hubs: For more on funded startups and verified decision-maker contacts, browse the Growth List weekly lists of newly-funded companies, sourced from Crunchbase. Michael Collins spent the most famous hours of Apollo 11 above the Moon, alone in the command module Columbia, while every photograph from the surface seemed to prove he was the one … Read more

Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund that owns about 1.5 percent of every listed company on Earth from a headquarters in Oslo, follows a 2004 ethical rulebook that still bans Boeing and Airbus over nuclear weapons, and returned 13 percent in 2026 and 15 percent in 2026 anyway.

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🗺 Part of the Growth List Startup Lists Collection All Startup Lists | By Funding Stage | Sales Outreach | Startup Intelligence The retreat of ESG in the United States has quietly redrawn the map of who actually buys compliance, governance, and climate tooling. For B2B sales teams chasing funded startups, the high-intent buyers no … Read more

In 1959, Yale historian Derek de Solla Price published a paper arguing that a corroded shoebox-sized lump pulled from a Greek shipwreck was a working analog computer from around 100 BC, a claim so absurd at the time that most classicists quietly ignored it for the next forty years.

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Discover the captivating beauty of a coral-encrusted shipwreck deep beneath the sea.

Resource Hubs: For more long-form features on the people, machines, and discoveries that shaped how the modern world works, browse the Growth List editorial collection. Think of a pocket watch. Now strip away the spring, the escapement, the glass, the centuries of refinement, and bury what remains in saltwater for two thousand years. Pull it … Read more

When Barclays told Paulson and Geithner at 8 a.m. Sunday that the UK regulator would not clear its Lehman guarantee, Bank of America and Merrill had already agreed to a $29-a-share rescue of their own

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Resource Hubs: For more on the institutional histories that shaped modern finance, browse the Growth List startup archive, our recently funded companies database, and our United States startup funding lists. At 8 a.m. on Sunday, September 14, 2008, Barclays told Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, and SEC chairman Christopher Cox that the UK Financial Services Authority … Read more

In January 2020, researchers studying a sliver of the Murchison meteorite published an age for one of its silicon carbide grains of 7 billion years, meaning that single speck of stardust formed more than two billion years before the Sun and drifted through interstellar space before settling into an Australian paddock.

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Bright meteors streak across a starry night sky during a captivating shower.

Resource Hubs: For sales and recruiting teams researching newly-funded startups, Growth List publishes weekly lists of funded companies sourced from Crunchbase, with verified decision-maker contacts. On 28 September 1969, a fireball broke apart above the dairy town of Murchison, Victoria, scattering fragments across the area. A local farmer carried pieces to the offices of the … Read more

When Dick Rowe supposedly told Brian Epstein in early 1962 that guitar groups were on the way out, nobody wrote the line down — it first appeared in print two years later, in Epstein’s own memoir, and Rowe spent the rest of his life denying he ever said it

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Resource Hubs: Newly Funded Startups · Growth List Blog · B2B Lead Lists Brian Poole and the Tremeloes got the Decca contract. The Beatles did not. That is the only part of the famous audition story that survives unchanged when you actually go looking for the documents. The rest of it — the smirking executive, … Read more