NELLIE BLY (1874)

Pen name of ELIZABETH COCHRANE.

Newspaper writer whose around-the-world race against a theorical record made the name celebrated and a synonym for the feminine star reporter.

She obtained a job at 18 as feature writer on The Pittsburgh Dispatch, whose managing editor suggested her pen name from a song by Stephen Foster. There she did a series of articles on such subjects as divorce, slum life, and conditions in Mexico. She was employed by the New York World in 1887.

Feigning insanity to get into the asylum of Blackwell´s Island, she wrote an expose that brought about needed reforms. Later she exposed tenement conditions, the techniques of "mashers", the Albany lobby, and the like.

On Nov. 14, 1889, she sailed from New York to beat the record of Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne´s romance, Around the World in Eighty Days. The World built up the story by daily articles and a guessing contest in which whoever came nearest to naming Nellie´s time in circling the globe would get would get a trip to Europe. There were nearly 1,000,000 entries in the contest. Nellie rode onn ships and trains, in jinrikishas and sampans, on horses and burros. On the final lap of her journey the World brought her from San Francisco to New York by special train; she was greeted everywhere by brass bands, fireworks, and like panoply. Her time was 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds.

Miss Cochrane married millionaire Robert Seaman in 1895; but after his death and financial reverses she returned to newspaper work on The New York Journal in 1920.