November 6, 1851, marks the birth of Charles Henry Dow in Sterling, Connecticut—a financial journalist whose work helped reshape how Americans followed business and understood the stock market. In 1882, Dow joined Edward Davis Jones and Charles Bergstresser to establish Dow Jones & Company. In November 1883, the firm began publishing the Customers’ Afternoon Letter, a two-page financial bulletin that brought the day’s business news to Wall Street readers.
Less than six years later, the bulletin evolved into The Wall Street Journal, first published on July 8, 1889. Dow’s contribution extended beyond reporting individual companies: he sought a way to make the market’s broader movements intelligible. He had published an early stock average in 1884, dominated by railroad companies. On May 26, 1896, he introduced the Dow Jones Industrial Average, calculated from the closing prices of twelve industrial stocks—a compact measure of an increasingly industrial economy.
Dow’s lasting achievement was to connect financial journalism with a systematic effort to interpret market behavior. His newspaper helped broaden access to business information, while his averages gave readers a shared reference point for discussing market conditions. His later editorials supplied the foundations of what others would develop into “Dow Theory,” an influential approach to interpreting market trends. Dow died in 1902, but the newspaper and industrial average endured, making his name a fixture of financial reporting long after his lifetime.
