In researching and writing about Denver Gas and Electric Company many years ago, I developed a lifelong fascination with entrepreneurs and inventors. The first was Henry Latham Doherty, one of Colorado’s influential leaders and shapers of Denver’s early gas and electric industry. Brash, bold, and innovative—the quintessential entrepreneur—came to Denver in 1900 to organize the city’s first gas and electric utility.
Doherty’s interest in utilities was acquired at a young age. His father had died, leaving his widow with four children and little money. Henry went to work at his hometown Columbus Gas Company as an office boy to help support his family, which he found more exciting than attending school. “I could not get along in school and was under expulsion a large part of the time I was supposed to be in school.”[1]
Although he shirked school assignments, his attitude toward work was different. He wanted to get ahead by understanding how a utility operated. He read machinery catalogs and talked to engineers and scientists to learn everything he could about gas and electricity.
His employers rewarded Doherty’s diligence by appointing him chief engineer of Columbus Gas Company when he was only twenty. Three years later, in 1905, he created Henry L. Doherty & Co. and used the skills he had gained as a youth to provide utility companies with technical and financial consulting. By 1910, he founded Cities Service, a national holding company comprising energy companies he had purchased
Doherty was involved in every aspect of the enterprise, including invention, management, marketing, and politics. He saw utilities as something for the public good and unabashedly took advantage of ineffective laws to achieve his objectives.
The same year Doherty founded Cities Service, the Denver Gas and Electric Company constructed a building with 13,000 exterior lights. They provided an ideal advertisement for the company’s modern electric lighting. The building still stands in Denver’s city center and is a beacon at night when fully lighted..
Later in life, Doherty reflected on his past by writing his reminiscences. He remarked, “Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, which will mean all your life.”[2]
Doherty’s legacy is that of an innovator and entrepreneur who set goals and used every available means to achieve them. Some of his contemporaries considered him a robber baron; others saw him as a contributor to the spread of technology and the nation’s well-being.
[1] Rose, Mark H. (1995). Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America. Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-271-03980-0. ]
[2] Ibid, p. 91.
Ellen Kingman Fisher 