Charles Henry Dow Courtesy of AP Images.

Dow, Charles Henry (6 Nov. 1851-4 Dec. 1902), journalist and publisher, was born in Sterling, Connecticut, the son of Charles Dow and Harriet Allen Dow, farmers. In 1857 his father died, and Charles helped his mother manage the family farm. Charles's two older brothers died in childhood.

In 1869 Dow went to work for Samuel Bowles, III, owner of the Springfield Republican. Like Bowles, Dow never had the benefit of a college education, although a colleague would remember him as having "the measured speech of a college professor" (Wall Street Journal, 27 June 1932). Dow shared his mentor's intellectual curiosity and learned the social responsibility of journalists to give citizens news worth knowing. Dow would write that his greatest wish was to be "a faithful correspondent who is nothing if not truthful" (Providence Journal, 21 May 1879). Bowles taught Dow how to write a successful lead, where the most recent, relevant detail starts a story. Dow practiced Bowles's advice to write "simple, direct, pure, and forceful prose" by "putting it all in the first sentence" in Dow's daily column "Springfield and Vicinity," which emphasized information over opinions (Bishop, pp. 5-7). This would be the model for Dow's later work at the Wall Street Journal.

After his five-year apprenticeship under Bowles, Dow became night editor at the Providence Star, where he became friends with Edward D. Jones, a reporter at the Providence Evening Press. In 1877 Dow moved on to the Providence Journal and its highly conscientious editor George W. Danielson, who deepened Dow's interest in developing articles of historical value. The paper's "news index" summarized stories of historic interest to its readers and is the probable model for the "stock index" in the Wall Street Journal. The paper supported Dow's development of a series on "The History of Steam Navigation between New York and Providence," later publishing it as a pamphlet. His pieces on the history of Rhode Island prisons and public education followed. Dow developed a reputation for terse and thoughtful writing, professional persistence, personal rectitude, and a newsroom presence of laconic imperturbability. Jones joked that Dow was a complex man, "a New England Baptist from Providence," who "worked noiselessly"(Wall Street Journal, 27 June 1932).

In May and June of 1879, Dow composed nine "Leadville Letters" on the Colorado silver boom that appeared in the Providence Journal. Dow accompanied a team of Wall Street financiers and geologists to investigate the Leadville silver strike, then in its twentieth month. On 21 May Dow wistfully told readers his "most ardent wish" had been to "see the Great Sunset land" and followed with a detailed summary of the city's history and the boom's future. In the fall of 1879 Dow pursued another dream. He left his job in Providence and went to New York City, seeking work as a reporter on mining stocks. His reticent, quiet-spoken certainty impressed the financier Cyrus Field, a risk taker himself. Field had helped lay the transatlantic cable and hired Dow to offer readers of the New York Mail and Express first-rate financial reporting and criticism.

Dow's work drew the attention of the Kiernan News Agency, which hired him as a financial correspondent. At Dow's urging, Kiernan also employed Jones. Dow's daily duty was to make sense of the exhilarating yet perilous free-for-all in stock speculation. Some stocks were bought and sold on the Curb Exchange, conducted outdoors daily in front of the Stock Exchange on Broad Street. The markets were unregulated with little oversight governing trades. Periodic panics plagued the market and shook the confidence of small investors, with charges that the "robber barons" J. P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and August Belmont controlled the market's devastating corrections. The possibility of making a killing in the market was drawing smaller investors to it. (Since 1883 Bulls and Bears had been a popular board game where players playfully outsmarted competitors in the world's largest equities marketplace.) The tall, gaunt Dow with slightly stooped shoulders could frequently be seen around the exchange taking shorthand notes on shirt cuffs. This news would be delivered by an army of carriers on "flimsies" to banks and brokerage houses around Wall Street.

On 9 April 1881 Dow married Lucy Martin Russell and the couple lived quietly with her daughter from a previous marriage in a frugal Manhattan apartment.

In November 1882 Dow and Jones formed a news agency that bore their names. It provided daily bulletins on financial matters to subscribers. They were aided in this effort by Charles M. Bergstresser, who had also worked at Kiernan. Their dark one-room office located at the rear of a soda fountain at 15 Wall Street was remembered by John Gerrity, one of Dow's $5-a-week messengers, as "a little ramshackle building next door to the entrance of the Stock Exchange" (Stillman, p. 20). The office started with a single typewriter, later adding a telephone, and had a female office manager who tried to keep the volatile Jones from swearing too much. Runners took the company's two-page afternoon letter, then produced through an ivory-pointed stylus on twenty-four carbon copies, to customers throughout the Wall Street corridor. The company offered accurate stock information faster than its competitors and included Dow's carefully written summary on stock prices and market trends.

On 3 July 1884 Dow's Customer's Afternoon Letter contained for the first time an eleven-stock index to track movements in the market. The stocks were nine railroad companies and two steamship companies that were widely bought and sold and whose price movement would constitute a daily "market average." Dow considered these the most representative and actively traded stocks on Wall Street in a day when 250,000 stock shares might be bought and sold. Chicago & North Western; Delaware, Lackawanna & Western; Lake Shore; Louisville & Nashville; Missouri Pacific; New York Central; Northern Pacific Preferred; Pacific Mail; Saint Paul; Union Pacific; and Western Union topped the list. That day's stock average was 69.93. On Christmas Eve 1885 Dow became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. He was now recognized as an important insider on the street. His highly respected index anticipated the trajectory of the national economy. On 7 October 1896 the Dow Jones Industrial Average reflected the growth of the consumer economy and included American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American Tobacco, Chicago Gas, Distilling & Cattle Feeding, General Electric, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American, Tennessee Iron & Coal, U.S. Leather Preferred, and U.S. Rubber.

The first four-page, four-column edition of the Wall Street Journal was produced from Dow Jones' 26 Broad Street offices at 3:15 in the afternoon of Monday, 8 July 1889. Its yearly subscription rate was a rather pricey $5. Each edition sold for two cents a piece. Advertising rates were twenty cents a line. Dow traced the four-year trajectory of bull and bear markets in that first edition, with a market average of 87.71 that had been posted at the close of Saturday night. Later that year the newspaper moved to a larger office at 41 Broad Street. On 18 April 1893 it expanded offices once again at 44 Broad Street. By this time Dow was well known and highly respected as an astute financial analyst. He noted that "when the market is down and dull" it was difficult to make investors believe it would rise again. And "when prices are up and the country is prosperous" it was difficult to make people believe "the boom would not last." Dow described a three-step process common to bull markets. The process began through "rebound and accumulation." Beaten-down stock prices slowly recovered through the infusion of "smart money." This triggered greater "public participation." As stock fundamentals brightened, small investors power the trend upward. Eventually, however, "speculation" drives prices beyond what fundamentals support. This, in Dow's view, created conditions for another downturn (Sheimo, ch. 1).

Dow was highly innovative. The 26 February 1897 edition of the Wall Street Journal announced that the Dow "ticker" would keep subscribers alert to stock price fluctuations throughout the trading day. The paper had grown to a staff of one hundred, producing twenty to twenty-five thousand words daily in a six-page, five-column format. A morning version of the paper was introduced on 14 November 1898 to meet a growing demand. Subscribers paid $30 monthly for the ticker, the papers, and bulletins from the Journal's news desk. Circulation soared to more than ten thousand. A year later Dow's highly successful "Review and Outlook" section began to regularly appear in the paper and confirmed Dow's reputation as one of the most intelligent analysts of the stock and bond markets. In April 1899 he correctly predicted the bull markets of the early 1900s.

Dow's health began to fail just as he was realizing his greatest success. The paper had expanded its attention to cultural reporting and no longer simply appealed only to professionals and insiders. Years of overwork, however, had left Dow somber and exhausted. He and Lucy moved to 56th Street in Brooklyn Heights, near a wooded park in hope the tranquility would alleviate his nervous anxiety. The separation from the office only seemed to intensify it. Bergstresser had married Lucy Dow's cousin in 1889, and in the decade that followed Jones felt increasingly isolated and unappreciated. On 9 January 1899 Jones left the company. The departure put a further strain on Dow. On 7 March 1902 he resigned as director and president of Dow, Jones & Company.

On 14 March 1902 the Dow Jones company and its Wall Street Journal was sold for $130,000 to Charles Walker Barron, who had headed Dow's news bureaus in Boston and Philadelphia. Dow visited his stepdaughter in Ireland, hoping the change of scenery would help his health. On 5 December 1902 the black-bordered Wall Street Journal reported with "deep regret" Dow's death at his Brooklyn Heights residence, the passing of a man who had labored so intensely to create what would become an American institution. Jones wrote that "financial journalism has lost one of its best and certainly one of its most honest exponents." In his view, no one had surpassed Dow as "a ceaseless searcher for facts and the best way to tell and distribute them" (Wall Street Journal, 5 Dec. 1902) A colleague commented that Dow's lasting contribution was "writing about high finance in the language of everyday life" (Rosenberg, p. 19).

In the century after Dow's death, the Wall Street Journal became America's first national newspaper, growing to a staff of 7,000 and a readership of nearly 2 million, delivering 12,000 items daily from 90 bureaus in 11 languages to financial professionals in 66 countries. When the company was sold in 2007 for $5.6 billion to News Corporation, its president Rupert Murdoch promised to maintain the integrity of a periodical that had grown to become a national heirloom and an irreplaceable barometer of the world's economic activity.

Dow left few personal papers. His monograph History of Steam Navigation between New York & Providence (1877) offers insight into his early writing, research, and use of history in economic analysis. Recollections of coworkers can be found in the fiftieth anniversary issue of the Wall Street Journal, published on 27 June 1932. Another early source is the memoir of John W. Barney, who worked with Dow in both Providence and New York. Those recollections appear in 1904 editions of the Providence Journal. Remembrances of Dow appear in the 1922 book written by William Peter Hamilton, an editor at the Wall Street Journal. The Stock Market Barometer: A Study of Its Forecast Value Based on Charles H. Dow's Theory of the Price Movement was later republished in 1989 and 1998. In addition to the early pages of the Wall Street Journal and Dow's 1879 reporting on the Leadville silver boom that appears in the pages of the Providence Journal, good secondary sources on Dow's life and his contributions to journalism and the world of financial analysis include Robert Rhea, Dow's Theory Applied to Business and Banking (1938); Charles B. Stansbury, The Dow Theory Explained: How to Use It for Profit (1938); Charles Preston, ed., The World of the Wall Street Journal: Main Street and Beyond (1959); George W. Bishop, Jr., Charles H. Dow and the Dow Theory (1960); George W. Bishop, Jr., ed., Charles H. Dow: Economist (1967); Jerry M. Rosenberg, Inside the Wall Street Journal: The History and the Power of Dow Jones & Company and America's Most Influential Newspaper (1982); Lloyd Wendt, The Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones & the Nation's Business Newspaper (1982); Edward E. Scharff, Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal (1986); Richard J. Stillman, Dow Jones Industrial Average: History and Role in an Investment Strategy (1986); Michael D. Sheimo, Cashing in on the Dow: Using Dow Theory to Trade and Determine Trends in Today's Markets (1988); James E. Buck, ed., The New York Stock Exchange: The First 200 Years (1992); and Charles R. Geisst, 100 Years of Wall Street (2000). A documentary, Dow and Jones: Wizards of Wall Street, was produced by Lou Reda Productions for the Arts & Entertainment network in 1996 and appeared that year in the network's Biography series.