The history of the Dow Jones industrial average

The history of the Dow Jones industrial average: The Dow Jones industrial average is one of the important market indexes that investors follow today.

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The Dow Jones industrial average is one of several market indexes created by Dow Jones Co. co-founder Charles Dow (pictured). It is named after Dow and statistician Edward Jones and includes the stocks of 30 large U.S. companies.

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The Dow was originally set up to gauge the well-being of the industrial sector, but these days few of the 30 component stocks have to do with heavy industry. When the Dow was created in 1896, it contained only 12 stocks, including American Cotton, American Sugar and American Tobacco. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. was also part of the original 12 but was later bought by U.S. Steel Corp., whose Edgar Thomson plant is pictured.

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Wall Street in trading panic as crowds stand across the street from the New York Stock Exchange when collapse of the market was reported due to heavy trading Oct. 24, 1929. During the great stock market crash of that year, the most devastating crash ever in the United States, the Dow Jones lost 13 percent in one day.

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The Dow closed above 5,000 for the first time Nov. 21, 1995. A few years later, on May 3, 1999, it hit another milestone: its first close above the 11,000 mark. For the decade, the Dow gained an astounding 315 percent.

Kathy Willens / AP

A firefighter moves through piles of debris at the site of the World Trade Center Sept. 11, 2001 in New York City. The third largest one-day drop for the Dow occurred several days later on Sept. 17, which was the first day of trading since the World Trade Center and Pentagon were struck in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Graham Morrison / AP

The current composition of the Dow Jones industrial average includes oil companies such as Chevron, banking giants such as Bank of America, retailer Walmart and technology powerhouses Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Getty, AP and Reuters

Employees at the General Electric health-care unit's production facility in Beijing assemble medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. General Electric is the only stock from the original 12 that still exists on the Dow.

Nelson Ching / Bloomberg

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