After reading The Dow Jones Average Kinds article you may be interested in learning more about the Dow Jones Average history.
The index was first published on 26th May 1896.
At that moment the index constitutes an average of 12 US industrial companies. The General Electrics is the only one company represented in the average nowadays.

The first industry rating issues constituted 40.94.

In 1916 the average indexed 20 companies, in 1928 – 30 companies.
On 14th November 1972 the index first exceeded the mark of 1000 (1003.16).

In the 80-ies and especially in the 90-ies the extraordinary increase of the index was seen. On the 21st of November it first exceeded the level of 5000 points (5023.55), and on the 29 th March of 1999 it overcame the 10000 mark (10006.78).

It happened only one month later, on the 3rd of May 1999 when the index achieved the mark of 11014.70.

The Dow Jones maximal mark 11722.98 was achieved on the 14th January 2000 with a dramatic decrease on the 9th 2002 October with the intermediate DJIA level of 7286.27 units.

The most considerable collapse ever happened on the Black Monday of 1987 with Dow Jones loosing 22,6 percent of its weigh.

In 24 hours after the 11 September 2001 the Dow Jones lost 7,1%.

Negative sides

The calculations include the most expensive and the most cheep stocks. It often happens that a slight correction of one stock rate may be compensated with a stock of a large weigh

Dow Jones includes only 30 stocks and is therefore not very much like an index appropriate to reflect the general dynamics of the fund market.