Maggie Walker

 Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born on May 5, 1865 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Her pen name later became Nellie Bly.  When Nellie was a child she was nicknamed “Pinky.”  Her parents’ names were Michael and Mary Jane.  She went to boarding school for only one term, before she had to be removed because her family couldn’t afford to keep her in school.

 Nellie’s family moved Pittsburgh in 1880, where her writing started.  The first piece that Bly became known for was a letter that she wrote in to a sexist column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. The editor was very impressed with the letter so he wanted the person that wrote it to join his paper, but when he found out that the writer was a woman, he would not hire her, but Nellie persuaded him to let her work there.  When she was only 21 she went to Mexico to publish a book about the lives of Mexican people called Six Months in Mexico.

 Within four months of quitting the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887, Bly had no money.  She convinced the owner of the newspaper New York World to give her a job.  The first thing that Bly did at New York World was go undercover and pretended to be insane in order to write about women being abused and neglected at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum. She stayed in the asylum for ten days.  Bly wrote about her experiences at the asylum in a piece called Ten Days in a Mad-House.  In 1888, she told her editor that she wanted to take a trip around the world in 80 days. She set a world record, visiting hundreds of places along the way, in only 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds from the moment she departed from Hoboken.

 Nellie left for her trip on November 14, 1889 on a boat called the Hamburg America Line. She only had two days’ notice.  The trip around the world was 24,899 miles long.  The only things she brought with her were the clothes that she was wearing, a coat, extra underwear and a small amount of toiletries.  She arrived back to where she started on January 25,  Some of the places she visited were  England  France  the Suez Canal  Colombo (Ceylon)  Penang  Singapore  Hong Kong  Japan

 Nellie got married in 1895 to a millionaire manufacturer. His name was Robert Seaman and he was 40 years older than her. She became president of his company.  After 9 years of marriage, Robert died.  Nellie Bly helped invent an oil barrel that became a huge advancement in manufacturing, and she was considered to be one of the leading women in the industry.  After the invention of the oil barrel, some of Nellie’s employees were involved in an embezzlement scandal and she went bankrupt.

 After Nellie Bly hit bankruptcy, she had to go back into journalism in order to support herself.  She wrote about the following events:  Women’s suffrage convention in 1913  Europe’s Eastern Front in World War I.

 A woman asked Bly to take care of a baby for her in She wanted her to make sure that he would be adopted.  The baby was one half Japanese so he was difficult to place.  He spent the first six years of his life in an orphanage that was owned by the Church For All Nations, which is located in Manhattan.  Nellie was older now, and she was starting to get ill. She asked her niece, Beatrice Brown to watch over the boy, and some other orphans that she had become interested in.

 Nellie Bly died when she was only 57 years old. She died in St. Mark’s Hospital in New York City in 1922 of a pneumonia.  She is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

 In 1946, Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen made a Broadway play about Nellie Bly.  In the 1980’s, a show called The Adventures of Nellie Bly started appearing on air. She was played by Linda Purl.  A fictionalized version of Nellie’s trip around the world was written in the comic book “Julie Walker is the Phantom.”  There was Nellie Bly Amusement Park in Brooklyn. Its theme is Around the World in 80 Days. It was later renamed “Adventures Amusement Park.”  In 1998, she was introduced to the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

 “Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.”  “It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.”  “I shuddered to think how completely the insane were in the power of their keepers, and how one could weep and plead for release, and all of no avail, if the keepers were so minded.”  “They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!”  “What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.”

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