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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 1890. And she did it in just 72 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 Cochran in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania.
Her Irish immigrant family had been successful enough to have the town named after her father. Michael Cochran had 10 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 past 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 belonging to the home as a working woman was surely a monstrosity, and he went further to suggest, possibly ingest, that 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 Ferrell's Anchorman, the paper's editor saw this fearless investigator and decided she 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 Díaz 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 was 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 Cockerill 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 faraway 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 psych 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 Blackwell's Island.
This was America's first municipal mental health hospital, opened in 1839. 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 Nellie Bly. 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, Nellie wrote this, 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. 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 ten 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-forcefeeding experience firsthand. The story made waves across America, driving broad reforms in how asylums were run and patients were screened.
Nellie 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 80 Days, Nellie told her editors 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, Nellie said, well, very well.
Start the man and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him. So Nellie got the green light. In addition to the dress she was wearing, Nellie packed a coat, several changes of underwear, a small bag of toil trees, and some banknotes and gold. As she later wrote, She departed Hoboken, New Jersey, and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw, and burrow. Along the way, she visited Jules Verne himself in France, stopped 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 in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds, beating both the titular 80 days and her own target time of 75. Back in America, Nellie married and began working in 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 stacking garbage cans. When the company went under because of her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism.
She died at age 57. 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, wondering what to do about his poor, helpless daughters. 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, 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 on Our American Stories.
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And me, John Sopel. With Global's award-winning podcast, The News Agents, dropping daily, covering everything you need to know about politics and current affairs. And The News Agents USA in the race for the White House. Listen to The News Agents on Global Player. Make your dorm the place to be with Roku TV, streaming players and smart lights. Head to Roku.com or your favorite retailer to deck out your dorm.
