Nellie Bly is remembered through a single photograph, a woman in a checked travel coat with a leather satchel, her gaze fixed just past the camera. Few who see that image know that within 32 years of it being taken, she would be dead, nearly broke, and buried in a grave that remained unmarked for 56 years. Before that picture was taken, she had intentionally walked into a New York madhouse to expose conditions inside. Four doctors declared her insane without examining her closely.
She had also stood before Joseph Pulitzer and secured a job that should have killed her. Later, she married a man 40 years her senior, inherited his factory, ran it, and lost it to internal theft while New York had largely forgotten her. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, her future seemed secure as the daughter of a wealthy mill owner and judge. That security shattered in July 1870 when her father died at 69 without leaving a will.
Pennsylvania law at the time offered little to widows of men who died intestate. The estate went mostly to her father’s older children from a previous marriage, leaving his second wife and five children nearly destitute. The system had worked exactly as designed, against women and minors. Bly never forgot it.
Three years later, her mother remarried a man named John Jackson Ford, who drank, was violent, and once threatened the family with a loaded gun. By 1878, her mother sued for divorce, a rarity for a woman of her station. The 14-year-old Elizabeth took the stand, testifying to the threats, violence, and the gun. The divorce was granted.
It was the first time her voice appears in any document, using language as a weapon. She briefly attempted to become a teacher, spending one term at the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania before money ran out. The family moved to Pittsburgh. Lacking money and a diploma, her options were factories, laundries, and other people’s houses.
She even added a silent letter to her last name, Cochran becoming Cochrane, an act of self-reinvention while still anonymous and broke. She had already concluded that the world was not arranged in her favor and that words, placed correctly, could rearrange parts of it. In January 1885, she read a column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch by Erasmus Wilson, “The Quiet Observer,” arguing that working women belonged in the home. The 20-year-old Elizabeth wrote an anonymous response, signing it “Lonely Orphan Girl.
” The editor, George Madden, was impressed enough to publish a notice asking the writer to come forward. He hired her on the spot. Her first piece ran January 25, 1885, arguing that working women were not a problem but a fact of the city. She needed a pen name.
Madden chose one from a Stephen Foster song, “Nelly Bly. ” The typesetter misspelled it as “Nellie Bly,” and the typo became the most famous female byline of the 19th century. She began covering slums, factories, and Pittsburgh’s divorce courts, writing without sentimentality. Within a year, the Dispatch pushed her toward women’s pages, so she left the country.
In 1886, she persuaded the paper to send her to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, accompanied by her mother. From Mexico City, she filed dispatches on rural poverty and the Catholic Church’s grip on the country. When she wrote sharply about the imprisonment of a Mexican newspaper editor critical of dictator Porfirio Díaz, word reached her that she had been noticed and might be arrested. She left in a hurry.
Back in Pittsburgh, she lasted a few months before walking out of the Dispatch office in spring 1887, leaving a note: “More or less, I am off for New York. Look out for me. ” She was 22. By late summer 1887, she had spent four months in New York, being turned down by The Sun, The Herald, and The Tribune.
With money nearly gone, she was weeks from returning to Pittsburgh in defeat. Instead, she walked into the office of John Cockerill, Pulitzer’s managing editor at the New York World, and refused to leave. The World was in a circulation war with Bennett’s Herald, and Pulitzer was winning by publishing exposés and stunts no one else would touch. The idea that emerged was for Bly to feign mental illness, get committed to the women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and write what she found.
Cockerill agreed, with a condition: the World would publish her story and try to get her out. He could not promise the second part. She accepted at 23, with no legal weight behind the arrangement. She practiced her performance in a mirror, working on versions of distracted and vacant.
On the morning of September 22, 1887, dressed in worn clothing, she checked into the Temporary Home for Females on Second Avenue as “Nellie Brown. ” She refused to go to bed, claimed memory loss, and frightened the other women. The matron called the police. A judge named Patrick Duffy, treating her gently, sent her to Bellevue Hospital for evaluation.
Four doctors examined her. None spent long with her. One pronounced her demented after listening to her heart. Another tested her reflexes.
By the time the fourth doctor arrived, the paperwork was signed. On September 25, 1887, attendants escorted her onto a ferry and through the iron gate of the asylum at sunset. The women were stripped, scrubbed with cold water and harsh soap, and given thin asylum dresses. The water was cold.
The heat was minimal. The wards held rows of beds too close together, with thin, dirty mattresses and locked windows. The food was old, the butter rancid, the tea undrinkable. Patients who refused to eat were force-fed.
The rest ate everything because the alternative was being beaten. The attendants shocked Bly most. She had expected indifferent doctors and an old building, but not staff who had decided the patients were not people. One nurse dragged a woman across the floor by her hair.
Bly watched, unable to intervene without contradicting her diagnosis, and made mental notes to write down later. Almost none of the other patients were insane in any sense that justified being locked away for life. One woman, Anne Neville, had been committed to recover from a physical illness and then forgotten. Another, Tilly Mayard, was unsteady after an illness and declared insane by men who knew her for ten minutes.
A German woman, Louise Schanz, simply did not speak English, which made her indistinguishable in the staff’s eyes from someone who could not speak at all. Bly tried to help Tilly, telling the doctors she was lucid. They refused to listen, and by the time Bly was released, Tilly was visibly worse. On the tenth day, attorney Peter Hendricks, sent by the World, arrived with documents authorizing her release.
The staff did not protest, never having known who she was. Her exposé ran in The World starting October 9. A grand jury was convened, and Bly accompanied members on a tour of the island. The worst conditions had been quickly tidied away by then, but the city increased its annual appropriation for care of the insane by roughly a million dollars, equivalent to over 30 times that figure today.
In 1889, Bly pitched a new idea: beat the fictional Phileas Fogg’s 80-day trip around the world from Jules Verne’s novel. Cockerill said the World would prefer to send a man. Bly replied that if they did, she would walk across the street, get another paper to send her, and beat the World’s man. She was sent.
On November 14, 1889, the Augusta Victoria left Hoboken with Bly aboard. Her luggage was a wool dress, a long checked travel coat, a small handbag, and several hundred dollars in gold and English banknotes. Her deadline was 80 days minus one. She was 25.
Unknown to her, Cosmopolitan magazine had dispatched Elizabeth Bisland in the opposite direction, hoping to beat the World at its own race. Bly did not learn of this until weeks later. In Amiens, France, she met Jules Verne and his wife Honorine. Verne, 61 and unwell, hosted her, hoping she could match Fogg’s 80 days.
She told him she would do it in 75. By the time she was in the Indian Ocean, the World was running daily front-page bulletins on her location and a contest for readers to guess her arrival time. In Hong Kong, a clerk asked if she had heard about “the other woman. ” She had not.
A competitor had come through days earlier, traveling east to west. Her assignment had turned from a stunt into a race. Her ship hit rough weather and lost time, arriving in San Francisco on January 21 hours behind schedule. The Southern Pacific had a private locomotive waiting, chartered by the World, which ran east at speed.
She arrived in Jersey City on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 in the afternoon, with cannons firing. The World’s official timekeeper logged her finish at 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds, beating Phileas Fogg by nearly eight days. Bisland came in less than a week later. Bly is on a postage stamp; Bisland is a trivia answer.
The race was the high-water mark of her career. She returned to a newsroom that did not raise her pay. Her next stories were smaller, her fiction did not land, and lecture audiences were polite at best. Within four years, she was no longer writing for any major paper.
On April 5, 1895, she married Robert Livingston Seaman, a 73-year-old Brooklyn iron works owner worth around a million dollars. She was 30. He had never married and had no children. His nieces and nephews, who had expected to inherit, sued within weeks, arguing the marriage was invalid, that Bly had manipulated him, and that Seaman was not of sound mind.
The judge dismissed most claims, but the litigation continued anyway. Their nine years together were not public. She stopped giving interviews; he had never given them. Seaman built Iron Clad Manufacturing into a large metalworking operation in Brooklyn, making enameled kitchenware and milk cans.
Bly walked the factory floor, watched the foremen, and read the books. She was learning the business. Seaman died on March 11, 1904, at 81. He left her the businesses, the houses, the paintings, and unfinished lawsuits.
The reasonable thing would have been to sell. She did not. Within weeks of his funeral, she walked into the Iron Clad office and told the foreman and bookkeepers she would be making decisions. The company grew under her direction, adding new product lines and expanding the workforce.
It began producing industrial containers, steel drums, and refining barrels for the American oil industry. Three United States patents were issued in her name during these years, including one in January 1906 for a metal barrel. She is sometimes credited with inventing the modern oil drum, but the actual designer was an Iron Clad engineer named Henry Wehrhahn, who had a habit of patenting his improvements in his employer’s name. The patents were Bly’s because she owned the company; the designs were Wehrhahn’s.
She also added a recreation hall, a library, medical care for workers, and hired women into bookkeeping roles previously held only by men. By 1910, Iron Clad had several factories, a workforce near 1,500, and contracts with most major American oil refineries. She was the sole owner. It was then that the money disappeared.
Edward Gilman, the chief manager and chief bookkeeper, had been with the company long before Bly inherited it. He kept the books, signed the checks, and ran day-to-day administration. Bly trusted him completely. He was stealing from her, systematically, for years.
Estimates of the total range from $200,000 to $1. 5 million. Gilman moved money into accounts he and accomplices controlled, mostly via forgery and payments to suppliers that did not exist. It was not hard to find once anyone looked, but no one from outside had been looking.
The first hints of trouble came around 1909. By the time Bly understood the scale, much of the money was gone. She filed criminal charges and civil suits. To cover payroll, she took out loans against the company and personal real estate.
Gilman was eventually convicted on some counts and acquitted on others, but recovered funds were a fraction of what was stolen. The civil suits dragged on. Real estate was foreclosed on. Contracts went to competitors.
By the end of 1911, Iron Clad had entered receivership. The Seaman family lawsuits were revived. By 1913, the company as she had run it no longer existed, and the houses had been sold. In the summer of 1914, she boarded a steamer for Europe, planning to be gone a few weeks.
War broke out. She did not see New York again for five years. Vienna in August 1914 was festive, with crowds cheering the declaration of war on Serbia. Banks froze, travel became complicated, and Bly could have left in the first month.
She chose to stay and cover the war. She had no press credentials and no contract, was 50 years old, did not speak the language, and had not done a serious news story in over a decade. She got herself accredited to the Austrian Imperial Army as a journalist within months. She filed dispatches to the New York Evening Journal, William Randolph Hearst’s flagship paper.
She covered the Serbian front and the Eastern Galician front, visited Przemysl in 1915 after the Austrians retook it from the Russians, rode in artillery convoys, and slept in field hospitals. She became the first American woman to report from the trenches of the war. Her dispatches were uneven. Some were excellent; some were sympathetic to the Central Powers in ways that did not age well after the United States entered the war on the other side.
In 1917, after the U. S. declared war, Bly became an enemy alien in Vienna. She was briefly detained on suspicion of espionage, then released.
Some of what she filed was held by censors; some disappeared. When the war ended in November 1918, she was broke, ill, and stuck in a city whose government no longer existed. She spent months negotiating papers, waiting for steamships, and helping other Americans get out. She returned to New York in 1919, having been gone almost five years.
In the three years left to her, working out of an office at Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, she wrote a column, covered a few news stories, and became, almost by accident, the city’s most efficient unofficial adoption broker. Her orphan column described specific abandoned and orphaned children, inviting readers to write in if interested in taking one home. By her own count, she helped place dozens of children between 1919 and 1922. The vetting was informal by modern standards, but the work mattered to her.
It was not glamorous. She got pneumonia in January 1922, after years of ill health. She was admitted to St. Mark’s Hospital in Manhattan and died on the morning of January 27, 1922, at 57.
The funeral was small. The Hearst papers ran respectful obituaries; the others ran shorter ones. Within a week, almost nobody in New York was talking about her death. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx in a plot purchased by family.
There was no stone because nobody got around to ordering one. The grave sat unmarked for 56 years. The stone that is there now was put up by the New York Press Club in 1978, identifying her as a journalist. Her name has since been recovered.
The asylum exposé has been republished. The world race has inspired multiple books and stage adaptations. There is a park in Brooklyn named after her, and a stamp. The woman in the checked travel coat is 25 in that photograph, about to do the thing that will make her famous.
She does not yet know she has already done the thing that mattered most, a 10-day stretch on Blackwell’s Island that put cruel people out of work and probably saved lives she never met. She does not know the race will be her last unambiguous triumph. Most of what makes her important does not end up on a stamp. She was robbed and humiliated, and people stopped paying attention.
She got up and worked anyway.