Elizabeth Jane Cochran: you know her by a different name

There was a time when Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who was born on this date in 1864, was world-famous. Nowadays, many of us probably recognize her pen name, but we’re not sure why.

Nellie Bly lived only 57 years, but she packed an awful lot into that relatively short span, starting with her career as a crusading journalist.

As a young woman living in Pittsburgh with her mother, Bly wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch, complaining about a sexist column that had appeared in the newspaper. The paper gave her a job as a reporter and assigned her the pen name of Nellie Bly, from a song by Stephen Foster.

A biography of Bly on the web site of the PBS series American Experience says she initially wrote about poor working girls and the need to reform Pennsylvania’s divorce laws, but the editors reassigned her to cover flower shows and fashion. Bly convinced her bosses to send her to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, but when she returned to the paper they stuck her on the women's page once again.

Bly headed to New York, and after spending six months looking for work, she walked into the office of John Cockerill, managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

“In what was either a bold challenge or a veiled brush off, he asked that she write a story about the mentally ill housed at a large institution in New York City,” according to the American Experience web site. “She did, impersonating a mad person, and came back from Blackwell's Island 10 days later with stories of cruel beatings, ice cold baths and forced meals that included rancid butter.”

Her story “stirred the public and politicians and brought money and needed reforms to the institution,” the web site reports. It also marked the introduction of  “a new kind of undercover, investigative journalism.”

Bly went on to write about corruption, poverty, shady lobbyists and the improper treatment of female prisoners. When she went to Chicago in 1894 to cover a railroad strike, she was “the only reporter who told of the strike from the perspective of the strikers.” As her fame grew, she profiled boxer John L. Sullivan, suffragist Susan B. Anthony, and anarchist Emma Goldman.

As if that wasn’t enough for one lifetime, Bly’s greatest dance with celebrity was yet to come.

In 1889, while still in her 20s, Bly set out by ship, train and burro to circle the globe, with the goal of beating the fictional Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, which was first published in the 1870s. She met Verne at one stop along the way; completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes; and was greeted by cheering crowds when she returned to New York.

At 30, Bly married a 70-year-old industrialist and ran the business after he died. When it went bankrupt, she returned to journalism. Bly was working for the New York Journal when she died of pneumonia in 1922.

How many centenarians can claim to have lived as full a life in 100 years as Bly did in 57?