The Thomson Corporation Delaware Inc history

Their partnership ended in 1949, just as Thomson began buying newspapers outside Ontario.

1952: Thomson buys his first non-Canadian newspaper, the Independent of St Petersburg, Florida, and expands into the United Kingdom the following year.

The enormous profits from Scottish Television (STV) made it possible for Thomson to buy London's leading Sunday paper, the Sunday Times, as well as 17 other local newspapers from the Kemsley family in 1959.

From television, newspapers, books, and magazines, Thomson next extended his empire into the travel business starting in 1965, when foreign travel was just beginning to become a popular activity in Britain.

In addition, Thomson Publications created a paperback imprint, Sphere, in 1966, aiming its titles at confectioners, news agents, and tobacconists rather than established bookshops.

In 1967 the company acquired 16 daily and six weekly newspapers, mainly from the purchase of the Brush Moore Newspaper, Inc., and was publishing more daily newspapers in the United States than in Canada.

In 1972 the group moved into travel retailing with the acquisition of Lunn Poly.

The consortium's first strike, in 1973, was in the Piper field, containing more than 800 million barrels of oil.

Later, stricter government controls led to a forced reduction in Thomson's holding and the company sold its remaining interest in 1977.

In 1980 Thomson relinquished the Yellow Pages contract and start its own local directory operation in partnership with the American firm Dun & Bradstreet.

Not long after the papers' operations resumed, International Thomson gave up the unequal struggle to introduce new technology on terms acceptable to the company and, in 1981, sold the titles to Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

By 1983 a quarter of ITOL's sales were to the United States and nearly 20 percent of its workforce was employed there.

At that time it had provided about 75 percent of ITOL's profits, but by 1985, when the Scapa field in which it had invested came onstream, this proportion had fallen to just over 50 percent.

ITOL's philosophy, according to a 1988 Forbes article, became: 'Buy the market leader, even in a specialized field, and then you can afford to pay for the acquisition.'

FindLaw began in Silicon Valley in 1995, when our founders compiled a list of attorney resources for a group of law librarians in Northern California.

1996 West Publishing Company is acquired, and most North American daily newspapers are sold.

The company took another major step to further its focus on information in May 1998, when it spun off Thomson Travel through a public offering that generated net proceeds of $2 billion. As a result more than 83 percent of 1998 revenues were derived from Thomson's information businesses.

Thomson Newspapers included 55 daily newspapers and more than 75 nondaily newspapers and had generated $810 million in 1999 revenues.

Acquisitions remained a key company strategy, as evidenced by the March 2000 purchase of the Prometric business of Sylvan Learning Systems Inc. for US$775 million.

After its merger in 2001, FindLaw continued to expand, enhance and update the legal information available on FindLaw.com while simultaneously developing its offering of online marketing solutions for law firms.

2002 Kenneth Thomson retires and Thomson offers shares on the New York Stock Exchange.