Background
Charles Henry was born on 6 November in 1851 in Sterling, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of a farmer.
Charles Henry was born on 6 November in 1851 in Sterling, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of a farmer.
His newspaper career included service on The Springfield Republican (1872-1875), The Providence Star (1875-1876), and The Providence Journal (1877-1879). While with the Journal he established a reputation by his articles on regional history. Two of these, later published in pamphlet form, was History of Steam Navigation between New York and Providence (1877) and Newport: The City by the Sea (1880). In 1879 he covered the Colorado silver mining boom as a special correspondent for The Providence Journal, writing a series of graphic articles entitled "The Leadville Letters," reprinted in Charles H. Dow and the Dow Theory (1960), by George W. Bishop, Jr.
Dow moved to New York City in 1880, where he became a reporter for the Kiernan News Agency, a financial news service. In November 1882, with Edward D. Jones, he founded Dow Jones & Company. The firm delivered news items by messenger to the financial institutions of Wall Street, and in 1889 began publication of The Wall Street Journal, of which Dow was editor until his death.
From 1885 to 1891 Dow was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and a partner in a brokerage house. He is generally given credit for compiling the first average of stock prices, in 1884. This average, and others he devised developed into the well-known Dow-Jones stock averages. His main contributions to the financial study were his classification of the movements of common-stock prices and his work on the business cycle. Dow died on Dec. 4, 1902, in Brooklyn, N.Y.