Nellie Bly's famous pen name began as an editor's spelling mistake
Elizabeth Cochran picked the pen name Nelly Bly, after a character in a popular Stephen Foster song. Her Pittsburgh editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and it stuck. Under that misspelled name she faked madness to get inside an asylum, raced around the world in 72 days, and later held patents for a milk can and a stackable garbage can.
Her start came through anger. In 1885 a Pittsburgh Dispatch column titled "What Girls Are Good For" argued women existed mainly to bear children and keep house. She fired back under the name Lonely Orphan Girl, and the editor, George Madden, advertised for the writer to come forward. Her early pieces argued that not every woman would marry and that women needed better jobs. Women reporters then commonly hid behind pen names so readers would not dismiss their work.
She went undercover as a poor worker in a copper cable factory, until owners complained and she was shunted to fashion and gardening. At 21 she left for Mexico as a correspondent, then fled after authorities threatened her with arrest for protesting a journalist's jailing under Porfirio Díaz. In New York, after four months of rejections, she talked her way into Joseph Pulitzer's World. She stayed up all night to look wild-eyed, frightened fellow boarders at a women's lodging house, and was eventually sent to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. Once inside she acted normally, yet staff ignored her requests for release until a World lawyer got her out after ten days. Her 1887 report forced reforms.
Her editor doubted she could beat Jules Verne's fictional eighty-day journey, arguing she spoke only English and would pack too much. She left on 14 November 1889 with two days' notice, met Verne himself in Amiens, and reached New York on 25 January 1890 after about 72 days, travelling almost entirely alone. The record lasted only months.
At 31 she married Robert Seaman, a 73-year-old manufacturer, and as his health failed she took charge of his Iron Clad company, a maker of steel containers; he died in 1904. She treated workers well, with health benefits and recreation, but embezzlement by staff and her own weak grasp of finance drove it into bankruptcy. Returning to reporting, she correctly predicted in 1913 that American women would win the vote in 1920.
Source: Nellie Bly
