Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran (May 5, 1864-January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, industrialist, inventor, and charity worker who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within.
She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born May 5, 1864, in Cochran's Mills, now part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, born about 1810, started out as a labourer and mill worker before buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse.
As a young girl, Elizabeth often was called Pinky because she so frequently wore that colour. As she became a teenager, she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane.
More information: Thought
In 1879, she enrolled in Indiana Normal School, now Indiana University of Pennsylvania, for one term but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.
In 1880, Cochrane's mother moved her family to Pittsburgh. A newspaper column entitled What Girls Are Good For in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that reported that girls were principally for birthing children and keeping house prompted Elizabeth to write a response under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl.
The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl.
Her first article for the Dispatch, entitled The Girl Puzzle, was about how divorce affected women. In it, she argued for reform of divorce laws. Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. It was customary for women who were newspaper writers at that time to use pen names. The editor chose Nellie Bly, after the African-American title character in the popular song Nelly Bly by Stephen Foster. Cochrane originally intended that her pseudonym be Nelly Bly, but her editor wrote Nellie by mistake, and the error stuck.
More information: Vox
As a writer, Nellie Bly focused her early work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch on the lives of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on women factory workers. However, the newspaper soon received complaints from factory owners about her writing, and she was reassigned to women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for women journalists, and she became dissatisfied. Still only 21, she was determined to do something no girl has done before.
She then travelled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent, spending nearly half a year reporting on the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches later were published in book form as Six Months in Mexico.
In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to flee the country. Safely home, she accused Díaz of being a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.
Burdened again with theatre and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the first time.
A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070-kilometre journey. She took with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money, £200 in English banknotes and gold, as well as some American currency, in a bag tied around her neck.
The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world, starting on the same day as Bly took off.
Bly, however, did not learn of Bisland's journey until reaching Hong Kong. She dismissed the cheap competition. I would not race, she said. If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern.
More information: The New Yorker
To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a Nellie Bly Guessing Match in which readers were asked to estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.
During her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, although longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and thus were often delayed by several weeks.
As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship RMS Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, after World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 pm.
Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, travelling alone for almost the entire journey. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. She also had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothnia) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria).
Bly's journey was a world record,
although it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train,
whose first circumnavigation in 1870 possibly had been the inspiration
for Verne's novel.
More information: Irish Times
In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers.
In 1904, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. There have been claims that Bly invented the barrel. The inventor was registered as Henry Wehrhahn.
Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I. Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy.
Bly covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913. Under the headline Suffragists Are Men's Superiors, her parade story predicted that it would be 1920 before women in the United States would be given the right to vote.
On January 27, 1922, Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital, New York City, aged 57. She was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.
More information: Smithsonian Magazine
Accept praise for its worth -politeness.
Be brutally frank with yourself. It's safer.
Nellie Bly
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