This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
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That's racevir.com. Uh And we return to our American stories. And up next, a history story. And of course, all of our stories about American history are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn all the things that are good in life. And all the things that are beautiful in life.
If you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu. In this story you're about to meet someone you've probably heard of. but probably don't know. She set the world record for the fastest trip around the world in the year eighteen ninety.
and she did it in just seventy two days. We're talking about Nellie Bly. She wrote a book about her experiences. But in the life story of Nellie Bly, This was just a chapter. In the middle.
Nellie was born as Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in Cochrane's Mill, Pennsylvania. Her Irish immigrant family had been successful enough to have the town named after her father. Michael Cochrane had ten children with his first wife. And after she died, He remarried and had five more. including Nellie.
When Michael died, He left no will protecting his second wife. or the then six year old Nellie. The next years were rough. Nellie's mother married and then divorced an abusive alcoholic. Nellie went to school to become a teacher, but couldn't afford tuition.
Pass the first semester. She spent the next few years working odd jobs around a boarding house. But her real break came when she read an exchange. In the Pittsburgh Dispatch. An anxious father wrote In to ask Pittsburgh's most popular columnist.
what he should do about his five unmarried daughters. The columnist Erasmus Wilson wrote a reply titled What girls are good for? According to Wilson, women belonged in the home as a working woman was surely a monstrosity. And he went further to suggest possibly ingest. then Americans might just have to kill baby girls.
Nellie was not amused. She wrote a fiery response under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl. The paper's editor recognized a good thing when he saw it.
So he took out an ad asking the mysterious writer to visit his office. When she did, George Madden offered her a job. And this was also when she took her pen name of Nellie Bly. after the Stephen Foster song. Nellie covered What the media ignored.
She took a job in a factory and wrote a series of articles on the conditions facing poor working girls and women. In a twist straight out of Will Farrell's Anchorman, the paper's editors saw this fearless investigator and decided he would be put to better use writing about fashion and flower shows for the women's pages. Nellie somehow talked her way out of this to become the paper's foreign correspondent in Mexico. There, she wrote about the everyday lives of Mexicans, but took a special interest in how the dictator Diaz had a habit of throwing journalists in prison.
So naturally the government threatened her. With just that. Unless she left. Back in Pittsburgh, the editors weren't going to let her wiggle out of the women's pages again.
So Nellie did what you might expect. She left her boss a note. saying simply, I'm off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.
Nellie spent six months penniless. trying to break into the New York scene. She finally got a meeting at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. In the late 1880s, New York One developing issue is the treatment of patients in the city's mental institutions. In what might have been an attempt to brush off this persistent little girl from Pennsylvania, The New York World's managing editor John Cockerll is a Asked Nellie to write a piece.
on one of New York's major asylums.
Well Nellie was game. Actually, That might be a bit of an understatement. She stopped bathing and brushing her teeth. She found the most tattered clothes she could, She stayed awake all night. making faces at herself in the mirror, taking notes, like far away expressions look crazy.
Posing as a Cuban immigrant Nellie Moreno. She checked into a boarding house, and let loose her best crazy act. The staff and other residents Bought it.
So did the police, a judge, and several doctors at Bellevue Hospital's psyche ward. Her impression was so good, in fact, that other newspapers at the time wrote articles about this so called mysterious waif With the wild hunted look in her eyes. Declaring Nellie Bly to be positively demented, The doctors sent her off to a women's lunatic asylum on Blackwells Island. This was America's first municipal mental health hospital. Opened in eighteen thirty nine.
Others had reported on conditions in the asylum, including Charles Dickens. who described it as a very painful experience. But no journalist was as courageous or creative as Nelly Blyth. From the inside, Nellie witnessed the plight of patients surrounded by oblivious doctors and orderlies who choked, beat, and harassed patients.
Some weren't insane at all, just recent immigrant women who didn't speak English. Regarding the daily conditions of the committed woman, Nelly wrote this What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up, and make her sit from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on straight back benches.
Do not allow her to talk or move during these hours. Give her no reading, and let her know nothing of the world or its doings. Give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months. would make her a mental and physical wreck.
When the patients weren't kept in isolation, Other so-called therapies weren't necessarily better. Quote My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose flushed with blue and cold. Suddenly I got, one after another, three buckets of water over my head ice cold water, too, into my eyes, my ears, my nose. My mouth. I think I experienced the sensation of drowning.
as they dragged me gasping, shivering, and quaking from the tub. for once I did look insane. The funny thing is that as soon as Nellie entered the asylum, She largely dropped her insane act. but the staff only took that as a further confirmation of her craziness. After 10 days locked up, Nellie's paper sent a lawyer to get her out, and she went.
to work. Her first article ran just two days later. The doctors and others responsible hemmed and hawed, trying every line in the book to excuse the inexcusable. A grand jury launched its own investigation and asked Nellie to assist because presumably few of them wanted to experience the rancid food force feeding experience first hand. The story made waves across America, driving broad reforms in how asylums were run and patients were screened.
Nully went on to write several investigative and editorial series on the conditions in New York jails and corruption among legislators. By 1889, she wanted a change of pace. Inspired by a Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Nellie told her editor she wanted to have a try. at just such an adventure. Her boss was intrigued.
But the people with the checkbooks Less so. No one had attempted to make such a trip in so little time. Besides, She's an unchaperoned woman. When some of the newspaper management seized on that point, Nelly said, Well, very well Start the man and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.
So Nelly got the green light. In addition to the dress she was wearing, Nellie packed a coat. several changes of underwear, a small bag of toiletries, and some bank notes and gold. As she later wrote, It will be seen that if one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling and not for the purpose of impressing one's fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a simple one. She departed Hoboken, New Jersey, and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw and burrow.
Along the way, she visited Jules Verne himself in France. Stop by a leper colony in China. and bought that monkey in Singapore. Thanks to telegraphs, submarine cables, she filed dispatches along the way in one of the great media publicity stunts of the era. She made it home.
Seventy two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds. beating both the titular eighty days and her own target time of seventy five. Back in America, Nellie married and began working at her husband's business, the Ironclad Manufacturing Company. Which made everything from milk cans to oil drums. She received patents for her new ideas of a milk container and a and stacking garbage cans.
When the company went under because of her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism. He died at age fifty-seven. As another fearless American innovator, our words are inadequate to describe. Perhaps we should remember this remarkable woman Not just by the fake insanity or her pet monkey. But by some words that launched her career Here is some of her advice to that anxious father, or Wondering what to do about his poor helpless daughters, quarreling.
Quote. How many wealthy and great men could be pointed out who started in the depths But where are the many women? Let a youth start his errand boy, and he will work his way up until he is one of the firm. Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn. Why, then, can't they do the same?
She continued. Here would be a good field for believers in women's rights. Let them forgo their lecturing and writing and go to work. More work. Less talk.
Take some girls that have ability. procure for them situations, Start them on their way. and by doing so accomplish more. than by years of talking. Nellie Bly, what a story, what a classic American story here.
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Member FDIC. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer.
Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and time. Detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs.
Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Okay. You've watched racing.
Now get behind the wheel. At Kaizen Autosport Racing School at VIR, professional race drivers teach you how to drive faster, safer, and with more confidence on one of America's legendary racetracks. Never driven on track? We'll get you started. Already experienced, we'll take you to the next level.
Ready to race? Earn your competition license and learn real wheel-to-wheel racecraft. Stop watching, start driving. Go to racevir.com. That's racevir.com.
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