Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Cochran was born the thirteenth of her father's fifteen children, in the Pennsylvania mill town he owned outright, Cochran's Mills, and named for the family. He died when she was six, leaving no will, and the estate went to relatives who left his widow and young children little. As a girl she wore pink so often that neighbors called her "Pink," then as a teenager added an e to Cochran to sound more sophisticated. A term at Indiana Normal School ended when the money ran out. In January 1885, at twenty, she wrote an outraged, anonymous letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch after it ran a column arguing women existed to keep house, and the editor liked it enough to put her to work.

Writing under the name Nellie Bly, misspelled by an editor from a Stephen Foster song, she talked her way into an assignment no paper had tried: feigning insanity to get committed to the women's asylum on Blackwell's Island, where she spent ten days documenting cold baths, spoiled food and doctors who never listened. Ten Days in a Mad-House, published in 1887, forced an investigation and new funding for asylum care, and made her, at twenty-three, famous. Two years later she boarded a steamer with two days' notice and no return ticket, and beat Jules Verne's fictional eighty days around the world by more than a week, seventy-two days, in real life, alone.

She married Robert Seaman, a manufacturer forty-two years older than her, in 1895, and when his health failed she took over his company, Iron Clad Manufacturing, running it as a model workplace with health benefits and a gymnasium for the staff. She had built a career exposing other people's corruption, she never saw her own executives coming. In 1911 an audit found her cashiers had forged her signature on checks and stolen roughly 400,000 dollars, one of them spending part of it on a yacht. The company went into involuntary bankruptcy. The criminal case against the men she blamed most ended in a hung jury in 1913, and she told the court, exhausted, that the fight had cost her "time, money, health, and, I fear, my mind."

She went back to reporting in her fifties, covered the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, correctly predicted women would win the vote within the decade, then filed wartime dispatches from the Eastern Front, arrested once as a suspected spy. Pneumonia killed her in a New York hospital on January 27, 1922, and she is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, in a grave unmarked for eight decades until journalists paid for a headstone. Later admirers credited her with inventing the 55-gallon oil drum her own company made, the actual patent belonged to an employee, Henry Wehrhahn. What holds up without argument is the ten days on Blackwell's Island and the reporting method it started.

Nellie Bly's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ten Days in a Mad-House book
  Her Blackwell's Island asylum exposé, first serialized in the New York World 1887
• Six Months in Mexico book
  Dispatches from her time as a foreign correspondent 1888
• Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days book 1890
• Iron Clad Manufacturing Company company
  She ran it after her husband Robert Seaman's health failed 1895
• Stacking steel garbage can patent
  U.S. Patent 703,711, filed under her married name, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman 1902

• May 5, 1864 aged 0 Born in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania
• 1870 aged ~6 Her father dies without a will, leaving the family little
• January 1885 aged 20 A furious letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch gets her hired
• October 1887 aged 23 Feigns insanity to investigate the Blackwell's Island asylum Published October 9, 1887, as Ten Days in a Mad-House.
• November 14, 1889 aged 25 Departs on her race around the world
• January 25, 1890 aged 25 Returns home, having circled the globe in 72 days
• 1895 aged ~31 Marries the manufacturer Robert Seaman and later runs his company
• 1911 aged ~47 An audit uncovers embezzlement and forces Iron Clad into bankruptcy
• January 27, 1922 aged 57 Dies of pneumonia in New York City

• Joseph Pulitzer 1847–1911
  Publisher who transformed mass-circulation journalism and endowed the Pulitzer Prizes. published her exposé
• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. covered the cause of
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. fellow undercover reporter
• William Randolph Hearst 1863–1951
  Publisher whose sensational newspapers and national media empire wielded immense cultural and political power. built an empire on the trend she started