Word: galluped
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Born to Poll. The methods which George Gallup uses are as old as those used by grain samplers, cotton testers or tea tasters. Gallup's contribution has been to apply those methods commercially to everything and anything in the world. A friend has said of him: "He wishes he had invented the ruler. Since someone beat him to it, Gallup has spent his life thinking up new ways to use it." It is almost true to say that George Gallup was born to be a pollster...
...Jefferson, Iowa (pop. 4,000) in November 1901. His father was looked on as something of an eccentric by the neighbors. He built an eight-sided house for his family, on the theory that it would be proof against wind storms, scribbled a new system of logic which Gallup still hopes to edit some day. He was an ardent Bryan man. As a joke, people started calling George "Ted," after Teddy Roosevelt, a nickname that has stuck ever since...
When Ted was a sophomore at the State University of Iowa, his father went broke in the postwar crash of land prices. Gallup made his own way with a towel service in the college locker room, later as editor of the Daily lowan. He transformed the lowan from a routine college puff sheet into a paper with national news. He began to get interested in why people read certain stories-and how many and which ones they actually do read. After graduation he stayed on at Iowa as a graduate student in psychology...
Toothpaste & Politics. He began his first experiments in polling, tramping the streets of Iowa City with a briefcase full of newspapers. At that time, a common way of measuring reader interest was to yank out the crossword puzzle for a week and count the complaints. Gallup adopted the startling device of confronting a reader with the whole newspaper and asking him exactly what he liked and didn't like about...
...bigger & better rotogravure section and, eventually, to Look magazine. Another sold the Chicago Tribune's Bertie McCormick on the public demand for fat Sunday editions. A third, for William Randolph Hearst, led to the birth of the first comic-strip advertising and a job for George Gallup as head of the research division in the Manhattan advertising firm of Young & Rubicam...