05/26/2026
On this day in 1896, Charles Dow published his first index of purely industrial stocks in The Wall Street Journal. Twelve companies, one average: 40.94 points. The original list included American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American To***co, General Electric, and eight others that no longer exist. GE lasted on the index until 2018, 122 years. The rest were gone within decades.
Dow already had a railroad average running since 1884, but rails were the old economy by the 1890s. The new money was in manufacturing, refining, and consumer goods. He built the industrial average to track that shift. The math was simple: add the stock prices, divide by 12. No weighting, no float adjustment, nothing resembling modern index construction.
The Dow was never a great measure of the market. It's price-weighted, which means a $300 stock moves the index more than a $30 stock regardless of company size. The S&P 500 replaced it as the professional benchmark decades ago. But Dow gave people a single number to track, and that number became the scoreboard. 130 years later, cable news still leads with it every night.
