In 1887, a twenty-three-year-old reporter named Elizabeth Cochrane faked insanity to get committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York. She spent ten days inside, documenting the rotten food, the ice-cold baths, the beatings, and the casual cruelty of attendants who treated the patients like animals. Her expose, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World under her pen name Nellie Bly, led to a grand jury investigation and an increase of one million dollars in the asylum's budget. She was twenty-three. This was her first major story. She would go on to travel around the world in seventy-two days, beating the fictional record set by Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, and that adventure would make her famous. But the asylum investigation is the story that mattered, because it demonstrated something that no amount of editorial hand-wringing had accomplished: that a single reporter willing to put herself at risk could change the way a society treats its most vulnerable people.

She Invented a Form of Journalism by Not Having Permission to Practice It

Bly did not have a journalism degree because journalism degrees did not exist. She did not have connections in the newspaper industry. She had written an angry letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch after reading a column arguing that women belonged in the home, and the editor had been impressed enough to hire her. When the Dispatch relegated her to the women's pages, she quit and moved to New York, where she walked into the offices of the World and pitched the asylum story. Researchers at the Newseum, before its closure, documented how Bly's undercover method, which she called stunt journalism, created a template for immersive investigative reporting that would influence generations of reporters. She did not interview sources from a distance. She became the source. She lived the story and then wrote it from the inside.

The World Trip Was a Publicity Stunt That Became a Triumph

On November 14, 1889, Bly left New York heading east, determined to circumnavigate the globe faster than Phileas Fogg's fictional eighty days. She traveled by steamship, train, rickshaw, and horse, sending dispatches back to the World that were published on the front page. She met Jules Verne in France. She bought a monkey in Singapore. She arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds after she had left. The entire country had been following her progress, and the celebration when she returned was national. The trip made her the most famous woman in America. What she did with that fame was less glamorous: she married a wealthy industrialist, took over his manufacturing business when he died, and spent years fighting patent thieves and corrupt business partners. She also reported from the Eastern Front during World War One, one of the first female war correspondents. She died in 1922, at fifty-seven, of pneumonia. The obituary in the New York Evening Journal called her the best reporter in America. The asylum had been reformed. The world had been circled. The angry letter to the editor had been answered. Nellie Bly is on HoloDream, where she brings the same fearless determination and the same belief that the best way to tell a story is to live it.