Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly tied the nuptial knot in 1895 with the millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Following her marriage, she retired from journalism and became the president of her husband’s Iron Clad Manufacturing Company.

In 1904, when her husband died, Bly took over the reign of the company. She became one the leading women industrialists in the US and was the inventor of a novel milk can and a stacking garbage can, holding the patents for both.

She breathed her last on January 27, 1922 at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City due to pneumonia. She was 57 years of age. She was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

Nellie Bly was born as Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, to a mill worker Michael Cochran and his wife Mary Jane. She had several siblings and half-siblings.

Young Elizabeth attended boarding school but just for a term before dropping out due to insufficient funds. Her father’s death when she was quite young had left the Cochran family with meagre means.

In 1880, the family moved to Pittsburgh where Elizabeth supported her single mother by running a boarding house.

Elizabeth’s writing career started abruptly and unintentionally. A misogynistic column in the daily, ‘The Pittsburgh Dispatch’, prompted her to pen a fiery rebuttal to the editor under the pseudonym ‘Lonely Orphan Girl.’ Such was the impression of her writing that it won her a full-time employment with the newspaper.

As was the trend then, women writers wrote under pen names. Elizabeth too began writing under the pen name ‘Nellie Bly’ after the Stephen Foster song.

Most of Bly’s early works revolved around the negative consequences of sexist ideologies and emphasized the importance of women's rights issues. She often exposed the poor working conditions faced by women. The investigative nature of her articles and her cry for women’s rights issues did not go too well with the editors of the newspaper who pushed her into the so-called ‘women's pages’ to cover fashion, society, and gardening.

Aspiring for a more meaningful career, she travelled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. She regularly sent articles reporting about the lives and customs of Mexican people which were later published as a book titled, ‘Six Months in Mexico.

Nellie Bly was ousted from Mexico after she ran a series of articles criticizing the Mexican dictator and ruler, Porfirio Diaz. Returning to Pittsburgh, she temporarily continued working for ‘The Pittsburgh Dispatch’ before leaving for New York City in 1887.

Nellie Bly’s first major work as a reporter was when she did the asylum expose for ‘New York World.’ Her work ‘Ten Days in a Mad House’ was a phenomenal success and won her great acclaim. Her report on the horrifyingly conditions inside the asylum led to numerous reforms in the living condition of the mental patients.

Bly’s literary success proliferated when she turned the fictional tale of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, into reality. She completed circumnavigating the world in just 72 days and recorded her travel experiences in a book titled ‘Around the World in 72 Days.