George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.
10 Facts About George Gallup
2.
George Gallup's higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and editor of The Daily Iowan, an independent newspaper which serves the university campus.
3.
George Gallup then moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he served as head of the Department of Journalism at Drake University until 1931.
4.
George Gallup was a professor of journalism at Columbia University, but he had to give up this position shortly after he formed his own polling company, the American Institute of Public Opinion, in 1935.
5.
In 1932, George Gallup did some polling for his mother-in-law, Ola Babcock Miller, a candidate who was a long shot from winning a position as Iowa Secretary of State.
6.
Not only did George Gallup get the election right, he correctly predicted the results of the Literary Digest poll, as well as using a random sample smaller than theirs but chosen to match it.
7.
George Gallup believed the error was mostly due to his decision to end polling three weeks before Election Day, thus failing to account for Truman's comeback.
8.
In 1958, George Gallup grouped all of his polling operations under what became The George Gallup Organization.
9.
George Gallup died in 1984 of a heart attack at his summer home in Tschingel ob Gunten, a village in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland.
10.
George Gallup's wife died in 1988, and their son, writer and pollster George Gallup Jr.