Engines of Our Ingenuity  No. 1199:  by John H. Lienhard  Click
here for audio of Episode 1199.  Today, we try to foretell how
you plan to vote. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created
them.  If I say Gallup Poll, what image flashes in your mind?
You see Harry Truman, smiling and victorious after the 1948
presidential election. He holds a copy of the Chicago Daily
Tribune with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." Gallup is best
known for that one half-century-old blunder. There's a terrible
irony in that. The studious George Gallup did more than anyone
to put opinion polling on solid ground.  Let's go to back to the
Landon-Roosevelt race in 1936. Thirty-five-year-old George
Gallup was running a fledgling polling service. He'd begun his
career by advising newspapers on how readers used their papers.
Gallup had written both master's and doctoral theses on the
psychology of marketing. He'd go