Born in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known by her journalism pen name of Nellie Bly, began her career when she wrote an angry rebuttal to an anti-woman piece in the Pittsburg Dispatch entitled What Girls are Good For. The editor offered her a job and Bly never looked back, becoming an internationally known reporter. Perhaps her most famous exploit started in November 1889 when she embarked on an around the world trip to beat the fictional journey of Phineas Fogg’s depicted in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Her paper, the New York World, offered a contest for their readers to guess how long the trip would take her. During the trip she met Jules Vernes and developed a global following as she filed stories throughout her journey. She set a world record when she arrived back in New York on January 15, 1890, seventy-two days after she set out.
Another famous work by Bly was “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, her account of life inside a New York City mental asylum for women. She disguised herself as a homeless woman and pretended to be insane in order to get committed to the asylum — one of the first and best known examples of undercover investigative journalism.
Looking at that photo, I don’t know how that poor lady could even breathe in that corset. No wonder fainting was so common for women of the day.
Fun but little known fact: The owner of Cosmopolitan (at that time primarily a literary/highbrow publication far different from what it is today), John Brisben Walker, when he heard that Nellie Bly was going to attempt to break the 80-day record, asked one of his writers, Elizabeth Bisland (1861-1929) to attempt the same feat, but in the other direction — heading west across the continental U.S. and Pacific. She arrived back in New York in 76 days — 4 days behind Bly due to a missed steamship connection in Ireland, but still well ahead of the fictional Phileas Fogg. She wrote about her journey for the magazine and also published a book, In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World (1891).