Elizabeth Cochran 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.[1] She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.[2]
Asylum Exposé
Nellie Bly took an undercover assignment for the New York World in which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now named Roosevelt Island.[21]
Undercover in an Insane Asylum
Around the World
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,[27] she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line,[28] and began her 40,070 kilometer journey.
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 trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.[29][30]
Nellie Bly in Traveling Cloak, Public Domain, via Wikipedia Commons
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.
“Nellie Bly.” Wikipedia, 1 Dec. 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly.