On July 8, 1889, three young reporters in a tiny basement office at 15 Wall Street in New York City finished printing the very first edition of a brand-new newspaper. Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser had spent their days running down the cobblestone streets of lower Manhattan, scribbling stock prices on slips of paper, and rushing back to their office to print up little newsletters they called 'flimsies.' Now they were ready for something bigger: a four-page newspaper called The Wall Street Journal, priced at two cents.
The first edition had no fancy pictures, no comics, no sports scores - just dense columns of business news, ship arrivals, and the latest prices of railroad and steel company stocks. The same trio also created the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a list of America's biggest companies whose stock prices, averaged together, would tell people whether the economy was up or down. That number, the Dow, is still announced on the news every single day.
From that tiny basement, The Wall Street Journal grew into one of the most important newspapers in the world. It has won 38 Pulitzer Prizes, the highest award in journalism, and today is read by millions of people in print and online. Its famous black-and-white hand-drawn portraits, called 'hedcuts,' became a signature style copied nowhere else. From Tokyo to London to Wall Street itself, business leaders, presidents, and curious students reach for the Journal each morning - all thanks to three reporters with sharp pencils and a wild idea back in 1889.
