George Gallup, 1901-1984

George H. Gallup is famed for his groundbreaking work in public opinion surveying. Scandinavian countries, whose languages do not include a world for "poll," have adopted the eponymous Gallup to rectify the omission.

George Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, on Nov. 18, 1901. While editor of the Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa and later an interviewer for D'Arcy Advertising in 1922, he became interested in the way people read, which stories and how many. This interest provided him with the topic for his Ph.D. thesis, "A New Technique for Objective Methods for Measuring Reader Interests in Newspapers." The thesis was based on a survey, which he designed, of the editorial and advertisement content of The Des Moines Register & Tribune. Among his conclusions he found out that most readers preferred comics to the front page and feature stories to news.

He returned to the University of Iowa and was hired as one of the first four faculty members for the new School of Journalism, founded in 1924. In 1926 Gallup founded the Quill and Scroll Society, while enrolled as a graduate student in the University. He as started an international fraternity for high school journalists that today has more then 11,000 chapters worldwide.

By the late 1920s, while canvassing door to door in St. Louis for Alex Miller, his father-in-law, campaign for governor of Iowa, Gallup began wondering if and how an election's outcome might be predicted accurately. Gallup was convinced that his sampling technique could be used predict the outcome of political races. The technique worked, which led to the establishment in 1935 of the American Institute of Public Opinion, popularly know as the Gallup Poll. In 1958 the name was changed to the Gallup Organization Inc. In 1935, Gallup predicted the outcome of the 1936 presidential election as a victory of Roosevelt over Landon with an error of 6.8 percent. His method gained wide acceptance and was not diminished by his 1948 prediction that Dewey would beat Truman by five to fifteen percentage points.

In 1932 Gallup left academia to join Young &Rubicam, where he stayed for 16 years. Gallup invented various research methods and procedures to measure advertising and copy effectiveness, media, and audience profile. He received numerous throughout his career, including the Advertising Gold Medal Award (1964) and the AMA's Parlin Award (1965). In 1977, he was inducted into The Advertising Hall of Fame.

Gallup published numerous books during his career, including The Pulse of Democracy: The Public Opinion Poll and How It Works (1940); A Guidebook to Public Opinion Polls (1944); Secrets of Long Life (1960); The Miracle Ahead (1964); A Survey of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools (1969); Attitudes of Young Americans (1971); The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (1972); Sophisticated Poll Watcher's Guide (1976); and The Gallup Poll: 1972-77 (1978). In addition he edited The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion from 1979 to 1983.

He died of a heart attack at his summer home in Tschingel, Switzerland, on July 26, 1984.