Herd Instinct: Financial Firms Combat Information Overload with Social Networking Tech

In the late 1840s, a young Paul Reuter realized that using homing pigeons to deliver stock-market information from the Paris exchange on a route between Brussels and Aachen in Germany, would be much faster than the post train. Over the next few years, pigeons were eventually superseded by a telegraph link between the UK and the Continent, and further sped up by an extension to Cork, Ireland, which would transmit information dropped in canisters by passing ships from the US directly to London