Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly (1864–1922) was the pen name of Elizabeth Cochrane, an American journalist who pioneered investigative reporting. Born in Pennsylvania, she began at the Pittsburgh Dispatch with articles on the lives of working women, then moved to New York, where for Joseph Pulitzer's World she feigned madness to expose the women's asylum on Blackwell's Island, the basis of Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887). In 1889 and 1890 she traveled around the world in seventy-two days, beating the fictional record of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. She later ran her late husband's manufacturing company and reported from Europe during the First World War.