He helped develop life-saving radar jamming technology during World War II, and was a long-time professor at the University of Michigan.
During World War I, Dow was a lieutenant in the US Army Corps of Engineers, with stints at Camp A.A. Humphreys, Virginia (now Fort Belvoir) and the National Bureau of Standards.
In 1924, Dow married Edna Lois Sontag, and two years later he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as an instructor in electrical engineering.
Dow obtained a contract from General Motors' Fisher Body division to develop new induction welding technologies that used higher frequency current than previous methods.
In January 1946, at a conference on telemetry, he learned that the Army and Navy had begun a joint research program involving captured V-2 rockets.
Other influential contributors to space research were part of the panel including James Van Allen and, later, the father of the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun.
[9] The panel required all of its members to be actively engaged in relevant research, and as his first experiment, Dow chose to measure ion and electron temperatures in the ionosphere, under contract to the Air Force.
[4] In 1958, Dow was named Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a position he would hold until 1964, when he retired from teaching.