a biography of the day--nellie bly's 151st birthday (5 may 1864-27 jan 1922)
Nellie Bly
Elizabeth Cochrane, "Nellie Bly"
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane
May 5, 1864
Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died January 27, 1922 (aged 57)
New York, New York, U.S.
Nationality American
Occupation Journalist, Novelist, Inventor
Spouse(s) Robert Seaman (m. 1895–1904)
Awards National Women's Hall of Fame (1998)
Signature Signature reads: "Nellie Bly"
Notes
After her marriage, Nellie used the name "Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman," as seen in the signatures on patents she filed.
Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864[1] – January 27, 1922) was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman.[2] She was also a writer, industrialist, inventor, and a 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 faked insanity to study a mental institution from within.[3] She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.[4]
At birth she was named Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She was born in "Cochran's Mills",[5] today part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.[6][7][8] Her father, Michael Cochran, was a modest laborer and mill worker who married Mary Jane. Cochran taught his young children a cogent lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a young girl Elizabeth often was called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane.[9] She attended boarding school for one term, but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.
In 1880 Cochrane and her family moved to Pittsburgh. An aggressively misogynistic column entitled "What Girls Are Good For" in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl".[10][11][12] The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl".[12] After her first article for the Dispatch, entitled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job.[11] Women[citation needed] who were newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names. The editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. Cochrane originally intended that her pseudonym be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake and the error stuck.
As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on women who were factory workers, but editorial pressure pushed her to the so-called "women's pages" to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for women journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches later were published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.
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Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the entire journey.[16] Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. She also had missed a connection and had had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothnia) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria).[15] Bly's journey was a world record, although it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days.[29] By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick, and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in fewer than 36 days.[30]
Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors”, but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.[37]
Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922 at age 57.[5] She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx,[38] coincidentally in the same cemetery as Bisland, who died in 1929, also of pneumonia.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly