The 33rd president of the US, Harry Truman, is famous for ending the Pacific War by dropping atomic bombs on Japan, and also for sending troops to the Korean War. Truman achieved many tasks during his time, but back when he was campaigning for re-election, every poll that was conducted showed results predicting his opponent Dewey, from the Republican Party, as the winner. The poll results pointed so directly at Dewey as the winner, that Truman himself expected to lose the race for president and went to sleep early on the day of the elections. However, people later realized that there was a flaw with how the public opinion was collected. At the time, in order to conduct a survey, newspaper companies had to personally call separate households. What the newspaper companies didn’t consider was that households with telephones were rich people, and these people were most likely to support the Republican Party. Therefore, by using the telephone in the process of gathering peoples’ opinions, the newspaper companies had only asked supporters of the Republican Party who they were going to vote for, and the voters had naturally answered “Dewey”. The answers that the newspaper companies had collected did not reflect the overall public opinion, but the Chicago Tribune had already distributed the daily newspaper that they had printed the day before, with the headline “Dewey defeats Truman”. The actual result was of course Truman’s victory. After realizing their mistake, the Chicago Tribune made efforts to collect their misreported newspaper, but was not able to collect all of the copies. About one thousand copies of this historical misreport are still left, and are being traded at about ten million won.

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