David Hale and James Gordon Bennett didn’t agree on much. Bennett, publisher of the New York Morning Herald, mocked the religious devotion of The Journal of Commerce business manager, calling him “Rev. Hale.”

But when Hale showed up at Bennett’s office on the corner of Nassau and Fulton streets in lower Manhattan one morning in 1847, he had an offer the tight-fisted Bennett couldn’t refuse. Both papers had been spending heavily to gather news from afar. Hale proposed that he and Bennett save money by pooling resources to cover the Mexican War and other big news of the day. The men shook hands on the deal.

A year later, the cooperation between the JoC and the Herald evolved into something that would become much bigger.

David Hale

Newspapers were beginning to use the telegraph, invented by JoC co-founder Samuel F.B. Morse, to gather news. Telegraphy was speedier than news boats or horses, but costs were too high for individual papers to bear. Hale summoned Bennett and executives from four other competing newspapers to a meeting at the offices of the New York Sun.

Hale argued that only a joint effort could make telegraphy affordable and prevent telegraph companies from interfering in the newsgathering process. He said newspapers had to work together if the public was to be served with wider coverage of the nation and world.

His competitors were suspicious, but Hale’s argument was persuasive. The six highly competitive papers agreed to the plan, and the Associated Press was born.

Today the AP is the backbone of the world’s news-gathering system. It is the world’s largest news organization, transmitting 20 million words and 1,000 photographs a day, in addition to online, television and radio news services. The sun never sets on the AP, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The AP has 3,700 employees in 242 bureaus worldwide. Its reports form the basis for much of what is in newspapers and television and cable networks.

Hale was the driving force behind creation of the AP, and the paper provided the first three presidents of the news cooperative. The first was Gerard Hallock, the JoC’s editor. He served until Aug. 31, 1861, when he stepped down to save the life of his paper. Based on a grand jury’s indictment of Hallock for “disloyalty” to the Union cause, the Lincoln administration refused to renew the JoC’s postal privileges unless Hallock quit. He disposed of his interest in the JoC to David M. Stone, head of the paper’s commercial news department, and to William Cowper Prime, who immediately succeeded him as president of the AP.

Prime, who was briefly clapped into a military prison after the JoC was hoaxed into publishing a bogus proclamation attributed to President Lincoln, served as AP president until 1869. He was succeeded as AP president by the JoC’s David M. Stone, who proposed that the New York AP be combined with a similar cooperative that had been established by papers outside the city.

That decision cleared the way for development of the AP into what Judge Learned Hand described in a 1943 legal decision as “a vast, intricately reticulated organization, the largest of its kind, gathering news from all over the world, the chief single source of news from all over the world, the chief single source of news for the American press, universally agreed to be of prime consequence.”