Doherty was born on May 15, 1870 in Columbus, Ohio, the fourth and youngest child and second son of Frank and Anna (McIlvaine) Doherty. On his father's side he was of English, Scotch, and Irish stock, a descendant of William Doherty, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1800 and became a prominent Ohio lawyer. Frank Doherty was a college-trained engineer and superintendent of a waterworks, but his death in 1882 left the family in straitened circumstances.
Young Henry left school at the age of twelve to become a two-dollar-a-week office boy at the Columbus Gas Company. Apparently he had not been well adjusted in elementary school, probably because his extraordinary mental ability was not adequately stimulated. The apparatus at the gas works, however, excited him and set off a chain reaction of self-education that lasted all his life, not only enabling him to deal with experts in varied fields but making him an expert himself and a teacher of experts. His three honorary doctorates (from Lehigh, Temple, and Miami universities), his medal from the Franklin Institute, even his 140 patents (in such varied fields as gas, cement, chemicals, coke, smelting, petroleum, and house heating) provide only a pale indication of the scope of the self-education which made him a master of a score of specialties.
Doherty was particularly alert to interrelations in the utility field. Working up from office boy to chief engineer at the Columbus Gas Company, he made it his business to understand the contemporaneous growth of electricity as a utility. He was one of the first to realize that the proper strategy for gas companies faced by the competition of electric light was to develop new uses for gas, such as for cooking.
In 1896 the New York banking firm of Emerson McMillin & Company, which controlled the Columbus gas works, along with gas and electric properties in some thirty cities, sent Doherty to Madison, Wisconsin, on the first of a series of trouble-shooting missions. Before long he was chief engineer and general manager of all the McMillin properties, which he reorganized from loose "banking-house" control into a formal holding company (the American Light and Traction Company). Active in organizations in the utility field, he presented a famous paper, "Equitable, Uniform and Competitive Rates, " before the National Electric Light Association in 1900 and served as president of the association in 1901-1902. In 1905 he formed his own firm, Henry L. Doherty & Company, to render engineering and financial services to utilities. Five years later he brought three operating companies under a holding company which he called Cities Service. Cities Service expanded rapidly - fifty-three operating companies were acquired in the single year 1913. Many of them had been in difficulties through the inability of local managements to keep pace with the unprecedented tempo of technological and economic change. Thus there were many opportunities for the superb technicians of the Doherty organization to apply the Doherty formula: "acquire, rebuild, merge, re-finance, infuse new life and new organization, and move on to the next field. " The fields in which Doherty and his colleagues could make improvements expanded in geometrical ratio. Manufactured gas led them to natural gas, and drilling for natural gas, to oil. Always there were the opportunities to pioneer - to do something at least a little better than it had been done before. The first long-distance large-diameter high-pressure gas pipeline, from Amarillo, Texas, to Chicago, was finished by Doherty in 1931.
He was among the first users of underground storage to meet the seasonal peaks in the use of gas. The wasteful practice of drilling so-called "off-set wells" in oil fields, to draw off the oil as rapidly as possible before a competitor could tap the same deposit or "pool" from adjoining land, shocked Doherty, and for several years he fought almost single-handedly within the petroleum industry for rational conservation measures, notably legislation requiring unit operation of oil pools. All this expansion required capital faster than it could be supplied from earnings, especially by regulated utilities, and faster than orthodox bankers would provide it for so unorthodox an engineer. He found some in Europe until World War I, when many Cities Service securities were dumped on the New York market. Increasingly he relied on selling his own stocks and debentures through a network of branch offices of Henry L. Doherty & Company, using high-pressure methods on his employees and customers, including an artificially high "support price, " determined largely by the New York buying of a subsidiary, Cities Service Securities Company. This frenzied finance, in which he persisted despite warnings from financially saner leaders of the utility industry, was neither uncommon nor illegal at the time. When in 1937 he paid over a million dollars personally into Cities Service to settle a stockholders' suit over some 1928-1929 transactions, it was without admission of wrongdoing.
But some of the practices in which he had engaged were subsequently declared out of bounds by the Securities Act of 1933 and the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. The "death sentence" clause, which fell harshly on Cities Service and added immeasurably to the problems of Doherty's successors, would hardly have been included in the Holding Company Act except for the shocking tactics used by Cities Service and one other holding company in lobbying against it. Besides his vast utilities holdings he invested heavily in real estate during the 1920's, particularly Wall Street office buildings and Florida resort hotels.
Doherty died on December 26, 1939, of bronchial pneumonia in Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia, in which he had resided as a semiinvalid for three years. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City.
Doherty had few peers in breadth and depth of understanding of the complex technologies of his age. Few have matched his personal contribution in translating new technology into production of goods and services. Moreover, he did not neglect broader implications. He received numerous awards and recognition for his contributions to the development of scientific methodology in the petroleum industry. In 1969, Columbia University added his name to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, after he made a large contribution.
Although a prime target for the New Deal, Doherty professed strong admiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and sympathy for his main objectives. From 1934 through 1937 he was chairman of the annual Roosevelt Birthday Balls to aid sufferers from infantile paralysis.
Doherty the financial wizard looked like a "phony" after the crash - and perhaps he was always essentially fictitious. The famous beard, which made him look like a card sharp off a Mississippi steamboat, was frankly stage makeup, grown originally to hide his youth from bankers from whom he hoped to raise money.
Despite physical frailties, Doherty was a prodigious worker, given to such eccentricities as 2 A. M. conferences and ingeniously gadgeted apartments within walking distance of his Wall Street offices.
Until he was nearly sixty, Doherty was a confirmed bachelor, vowing that he would leave his personal fortune to his business. In 1929, however, he married a widowed nurse, Mrs. Grace Eames, who had attended him through one of his severe bouts with arthritis, and adopted her daughter. An elaborate debut for Helen Lee Eames Doherty in the depths of the depression drew the ire of Senator George Norris and added fuel to his anti-utility campaign.
