Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane (1864–1922), born near Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania, who began writing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch at eighteen after a column dismissing women as unfit for anything but housework provoked her to send the editor an anonymous rebuttal so forceful he hired her instead. Moving to Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1887, she got herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island by feigning insanity, and her resulting exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, led to a grand jury investigation and a large increase in the city's asylum funding — establishing a new, more dangerous kind of undercover investigative reporting. In 1889–90 she circled the globe in 72 days, beating the fictional record of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and becoming an international celebrity. She largely left journalism after marrying the manufacturer Robert Seaman in 1895, running his ironworks company as its president after his death until a decade of embezzlement by employees forced it into bankruptcy, then returned to reporting, covering the Eastern Front during the First World War as one of the first women war correspondents. She died in New York at fifty-seven.