This Day in Wall Street History 1851 : Charles Henry Dow was born

Charles Henry Dow, the journalist and economist who helped wed media to the stock markets, was born on this day in Connecticut in 1851. Dow moved to New York in 1880 to work as a stringer for a financial news wire. In 1882, he joined forces with Edward D. Jones to produce news reports for Wall Street brokerage firms. The newly formed Dow Jones & Company would churn out these bulletins, then known as "flimsies," or "slips," and send them over to Wall Street via messenger. Dow and his team would cap the day with a summary report of the market action that, by 1889, had evolved into the Wall Street Journal. Dow was the first editor of the Journal, using the paper as a vehicle to postulate his economic beliefs, including the aptly named "Dow theory." Along the way, Dow developed a statistical method for measuring the markets that has since become the Dow Jones average. 

source: www.history.com