A Dow was born
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SCOTT JAGOW: Let’s take a peek into the Marketplace Vault. Today we celebrate a man’s birthday, a man whose name we say every day on this show . . .
STACEY VANEK-SMITH: Back in 1851, Charles Henry Dow was born into a farming family. He never finished high school. Instead, he got an early start on a career in journalism.
Dow moved to New York in his late twenties to work for a news wire and a couple of years later, he teamed up with Edward Jones to form Dow Jones and Company, which produced financial news reports for Wall Street brokerage firms.
By 1889, those reports had grown into the Wall Street Journal. Dow was the Journal’s first editor.
While he was there, Dow developed a statistical method for measuring the markets. He averaged the prices of selected stocks.
We still use the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Dow stayed at the Wall Street Journal for more than 10 years until failing health pushed him to sell it. He died at age 51
I’m Stacey Vanek-Smith.
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