Journalist Nellie Bly is poised for her record-breaking round-the-world journey. *
Image: Corbis * 1889: Journalist Nellie Bly, who made her name as a reporter by exposing the inhumane conditions inside a New York insane asylum, leaves on a Jules Verne-inspired trip around the world. She completes the 24,899-mile journey in 72 days, a record.
Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was the prototype of the independent woman: "one tough broad" in newspaper parlance. She came to the business after the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch read her angry rebuttal to what would today be called a sexist editorial by one of the paper's columnists. The editor was duly impressed and, after tracking her down, offered her a reporting job. It was there she acquired her pen name, Nellie Bly, which she carried with her for the rest of her life.
After traveling to Mexico and attacking the Mexican government for corruption in a series of stories, she returned to the United States and moved to New York, where she eventually found a job with Joseph Pulitzer's World. She covered women's rights issues but also specialized in investigative stories. In fact, she's often credited with inventing the practice of investigative reporting.
Inspired by Jules Verne's wildly popular 1873 novel, Around the World in 80 Days, Bly proposed to her editors at the New York World that she undertake the same trip to try and break the fictional record. Traveling by steamer, train, rickshaw and any number of other conveyances, she did -- by eight days.
She left Hoboken, New Jersey, on the German liner Augusta Victoria and returned to New York on Jan. 25, 1890. Bly received a tumultuous welcome, including a parade, and became a national figure. Her account of the journey, Around the World in 72 Days, sold exceptionally well.
Although the record was short-lived -- adventurer George Francis Train made a lightning 67-day circumnavigation a few months later -- Bly's accomplishment was remarkable, considering she made the trip as an unaccompanied woman at a time when women rarely went unaccompanied to a Manhattan restaurant, let alone around the world.
Bly left a big footprint wherever she trod. Besides journalism and adventuring, Bly became an industrialist (thanks to marrying a man 40 years her senior and inheriting his company upon the inevitable). She radically improved working conditions for her employees and found time to invent and patent the steel drum, forerunner to the 55-gallon drum still in widespread use.
(Source: City College of New York)
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