Nellie Bly returns

Nellie preparing for her trip

Today is the day, back in 1890, that journalist Nellie Bly returned home after an around-the-world trip. In record time. She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran (later changing the spelling to Cochrane) in Western Pennsylvania (about 50 miles from where I grew up). She got a job in a newspaper in Pittsburgh (where she started to use the pen name of Nellie Bly) but her fame came when she moved to New York to work at the prestigious New York World. Her around-the-world trip was designed to follow the route of the fictional Phileas Fogg (from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days which was published only 16 years before) and she managed to beat his time by almost 8 days.

You can read more about her in the Wikipedia article found here. She was a fascinating woman. She was one of the first (if not the first) investigative reporters. For another story, she pretended to be insane to get into a "lunatic asylum" (as they were called then) to report on the conditions there without the authorities knowing. Most people didn't know the horrible conditions there but once Nellie's article came out, the New York officials were all over themselves to do something about it.

You can read her book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, for free at the University of Pennsylvania library at this link. It's a very interesting read (and I think you'll enjoy the advertisements, too). At the end of that book are two shorter articles. In the first, Nellie looked into how employment agencies for servants were run and in the second, she writes about working in a box factory and describes the conditions of the working women there. I enjoyed her writing style. You can tell these stories were written over a hundred years ago but I promise you will enjoy them as much as stories that were written recently. Her good writing and interesting subject matter inspired others to uncover hidden stories through the decades. We need more people like Nellie Bly.

[ Update - In case you are interested in owning a copy of Ten Days in a Mad House, it is available from Amazon - use this link. Also, the story of her around-the-world trip, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days written by Nellie herself, is also available from Amazon - use this link. ]