By The Associated Press
CHICAGO — Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., whose family company has been the final word on whether television shows are hot or not for more than half a century, died Monday in Winnetka, Ill. He was 92.
It was the company founded by his father and then run by Nielsen that created the measurement system under which the entire multibillion-dollar television industry is based and, from the late 1950s on, the name synonymous with U.S. television viewing habits.
The elder Nielsen started a successful retail index business that measured sales in grocery and drug stores and then decided to go into measuring the popularity of various radio shows. When he got out of the service after World War II, Nielsen Jr. joined his father’s company. Two 1980s profiles in Forbes said it was Nielsen Jr.’s experience in the Army with a machine used to turn out artillery calculations that prompted his father to purchase one of IBM’s first computers.
Between 1945 and the time Nielsen Jr. retired, the company grew from fewer than 1,000 employees to more than 21,000, his son said. He engineered the company’s 1984 sale to Dun & Bradstreet Corp. for $1.3 billion in stock. The company went public this year as Nielsen Holdings N.V.
