The Man Behind The Brand – Big Business
by Doug Gelbert
published by Cruden Bay Books at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 by Cruden Bay Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Open a copy of the Information Please Almanac and turn to the chapter on famous people. 4000 names and you won't know hardly any. But what about names everyone knows? Pillsbury, Kraft, Maytag, Hertz, Kellogg, Gerber. Nowhere to be found. How many names are more famous than Howard Johnson? Milton Bradley? Oscar Mayer? But who were these folks? Let’s take a look at the men behind the corporate names...
Dow
Jones
Dow Chemical
Dun and Bradstreet
DuPont
W.R.
Grace
E.F. Hutton
H & R Block
Merrill
Lynch
Monsanto
Procter & Gamble
RJ
Reynolds
TandyCorporation
Westinghouse
And the man behind the brand is...
Charles
Dow and Edward Jones
Charles
H. Dow and Edward D. Jones were reporters digging up stories in
Providence, Rhode Island for the Evening Press while looking for a
way to advance their careers to New York City. Dow left first,
landing as a job reporting on mining stocks in 1880. Dow worked in
the Stock Exchange scribbling shorthand notes on the cuffs of his
shirt.
Financial news in those days went largely unreported save for sporadic reports from the office of the John J. Kiernan News Agency. The financial bulletins, known as "flimsies" because of the thin paper on which they were printed, were delivered by messenger boys. Dow soon went to work for Kiernan and summoned his friend Jones to join him in the business.
By the fall of 1882 as their contacts increased the two men developed their own ideas of how financial news should be reported and left to form Dow Jones & Co. in a basement at 15 Wall Street, next door to the Exchange. Dow and another Kiernan man, Charles M. Bergstresser, were reporters who brought the day's news back to Jones at the desk. Jones wrote the stories on agateware stencils and the copies were dispatched to clients by messenger. They called their paper the "Customers Afternoon Letter."
By 1887 hand-writing bulletins was too slow to keep up with the increasing demand for timely financial news. A hand-cranked revolving cylinder began churning out the letter on 5" x 9" pieces of paper. On July 8, 1889 the letter became The Wall Street Journal, a four-page afternoon daily replacing the letter, although printed bulletins remained part of the business until 1948.
An out-of-town correspondent, Clarence W. Barron, joined the paper to contribute news from the Boston financial district. A ponderous "ticker" was developed in 1897 to provide instantaneous news. Dow Jones leased the machines which had to be hand-wound every half-hour but ushered in the information age.
A morning edition of the paper was added in 1898 and Jones retired the following year at the age of 43. In 1902 Dow sold the remainder of the business to C.W. Barron. Dow and Jones passed from the public eye but not before they stamped their names permanently on the financial community.
Herbert
Dow
“Crazy
Dow” they called him. The 24-year old newcomer to Midland in 1890
was trying to tap into the vast prehistoric saltwater sea lurking
beneath Michigan. But it wasn’t salt he was after like everyone
else. Herbert Henry Dow was determined to distill bromides used in
photography and medicine from the brine.
Even if some townsfolk could appreciate the value of chemicals they were used to evaporating to get salt, no one could comprehend Dow’s methods. He planned to separate bromides from the brine with electric current - at a time when electricity was so foreign that President Harrison refused to touch the newly installed light switched in the White House for fear of electrocution.
Dow, a chemistry teacher at Case Institute, interested three Cleveland businessmen in his venture to extract bromide from brine. Dow first tried in Ohio but was unable to get by his inherent pumping problems. As the Canton Chemical Company was going under Dow was already laying plans to start again in Midland where the bromine-rich brine lay near the surface.
Using his patents as lure Dow attracted new investors to form the Midland Chemical Company in 1892. Dow was put in charge of setting up the plant but the money men quickly tried to ease him out. Relieved of his responsibility at the plant he had built Dow worked on removing chlorine from the waste leftover after the bromine was successfully removed from the brine.
Dow’s new process produced bleach but he couldn’t interest Midland Chemical in its mass production. Back to Cleveland he went for backing - this time to the academic community. The Dow Chemical Company was created on May 18, 1897. Dow perfected his process in Navarre, Ohio and again prepared to return to Midland. He leased the land next to Midland Chemical and bought their waste brine.
Dow envisioned the time when he could produce nine tons of bleach a day. But he was constantly thwarted by small explosions in the laboratory. Dow and his men worked around the clock in shifts looking for a solution until the problem was solved and production indeed jumped to nine tons daily. Dow then finished his plans to buy out his former partners in Midland Chemical and merge the company with Dow Chemical in 1900.
Herbert Dow had forged the new American chemical industry and now set out to export his products and break the German and British stranglehold on the world market. The foreign suppliers immediately slashed their bleach prices in half, driving all American bleachmakers out of business - except Dow. Dow continued producing bleach at a loss plunging deeper into debt as he fought for market share.
By 1909 the tide was turning and the Europeans began to withdraw from American markets. After the bromide war a real war finished the German chemical industry in the United States. The German naval blockade forced American industry to rely on American chemical producers. After the war Congress protected the chemical industry with high tariffs so the country need never rely on foreign manufacturers again.
By 1920 Dow Chemical sales soared over $4 million a year. The stock price climbed to $500 a share before the market crashed. “Crazy Dow” was now “Doctor Dow” around Midland. From the strange experiments he conducted in a shed on the edge of town he now employed 1600 people in town. Dow hired landscape architects to spruce up the town. When he died in 1930 at the age of 64 the company he started by extracting bromide from brine now had a roster of 500 products.
Robert
Dun and John Bradstreet
The
Duns emigrated from Scotland and settled in Ohio in the early decades
of the 1800s. All prospered greatly save for Robert Dun. He died in
1835 and his 9-year old son Robert Graham grew up as a poor relation
in one of the wealthiest families in Ohio.
At 16 Dun began his business career as a store clerk. In 1851 he eagerly jumped at the opportunity to join the Mercantile Agency, founded in 1841 as America's first credit reporting firm. Credit and its management were the engines driving young America's commercial expansion. The agency provided information to manufacturers and retailers on far-flung country stores. The Mercantile Agency promoted and protected trade in the Untied States.