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July 15 (UPI) -- In 1907, three organizations -- the Publishers Press Association, the Scripps-McRae Press Association and the Scripps News Associations -- joined to form United Press Associations. The wire service started business with 460 newspaper clients, of which 400 were evening newspapers and 60 were Sunday morning newspapers.
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Five years later, E.W. Scripps wrote in a letter to UP General Manager Roy Howard that "in those, my youthful days of pride, my vanity swelled at the thought that I was to be the savior of the free press in America."
"I determined to be as free in the matter of gathering telegraph news and printing what I wished as I was in gathering local news and printing what I wanted to print," Scripps wrote.
In 1958, UP became United Press International after it absorbed the International News Service, a wire agency founded by William Randolph Hearst.
At its peak, UPI had more than 6,000 subscribers.
Over it's 110-year history, UPI has won a number of Pulitzer Prizes, including for Merriman Smith's reporting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Kyoichi Sawada's photo of the war in Vietnam in 1965 and Lucinda Franks and Thomas Power's five-part article about revolutionary Diana Oughton.
On this date in history:
In 1799, the Rosetta Stone, which helped decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, was found in an Egyptian village by French soldiers.
In 1806, Zebulon Pike began an expedition to explore the American Southwest.
In 1912, the U.S. Olympic team, led by all-round athlete Jim Thorpe, took more medals than any other country at the Summer Games in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 1945, Italy declared war on Japan, its former Axis partner.
In 1965, the unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 passed over Mars at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sent the first close-up images of the planet to Earth.
In 1968, a Soviet Aeroflot jetliner landed at New York's JFK Airport, marking the beginning of direct commercial flights between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon disclosed plans to make an unprecedented visit to the People's Republic of China. He made the historic trip in February 1972.
In 1992, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was nominated as the Democratic Party's candidate for president.
In 1997, Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace was shot to death in front of his Miami mansion. The prime suspect was Andrew Cunanan, already wanted in four other slayings. He was found dead a week later, an apparent suicide.
In 2002, John Walker Lindh, a 21-year-old American captured by the U.S. military in Afghanistan while with Taliban forces, admitted he had fought as a soldier with them. After cooperating in the investigation of the terrorist network, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In 2007, the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese agreed to a $600 million settlement with 508 people who said they had been sexually abused by members of the clergy.
In 2009, Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran bound for Armenia. Officials said 168 people were killed.
In 2010, BP, the London energy company, announced it had capped its crippled underwater well that sent millions of barrels of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico over the previous three months after an offshore drilling rig explosion and fire killed 11 workers and unleashed an unchecked torrent from the depths.
