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—— ON THIS DAY ——
NOVEMBER 14, 1889
Hoboken, New Jersey, USA
137 years ago
Nellie Bly, the investigative reporter who left Hoboken on November 14, 1889, to circle the world in less than the eighty days of Jules Verne's novel.
On the morning of November 14, 1889, a twenty-five-year-old reporter for the New York World boarded a steamer at Hoboken carrying a single small travel bag, the dress she stood up in, a sturdy coat, and some money in a bag around her neck. Her name was Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman and she wrote under the name Nellie Bly. Her assignment was to travel around the world faster than Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne's novel, who had done it in eighty days.
Her editors had initially suggested sending a man, on the grounds that a woman would need a chaperone and too much luggage. Bly told them that if they sent a man she would start the same day for a rival paper and beat him. She went by steamship and train through England, France, Italy, the Suez Canal, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, filing dispatches as she went. She stopped in Amiens to meet Jules Verne and his wife in person.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Investigative journalism, the field Nellie Bly helped establish through undercover reporting, most famously her ten days inside a New York asylum in 1887.
The race was the stunt, but Bly's real importance was the work that came before it. In 1887, aged twenty-three, she had feigned insanity in order to be committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York, and spent ten days inside. Her account described rotten food, filthy water, freezing baths, physical abuse by staff, and women held there who appeared to have nothing wrong with them, including immigrants who simply could not make themselves understood in English. The articles, published as Ten Days in a Mad-House, forced a grand jury investigation and a substantial increase in the city's budget for the care of the mentally ill.
She had also reported on factory conditions, on the treatment of female workers, on corruption in Albany by posing as a lobbyist's client, and on the lives of the poor, at a period when most women in newspapers were confined to writing about fashion and society. She had taken the pen name Nellie Bly after a popular song when she got her first job in Pittsburgh, having written an angry anonymous letter to an editor who had published a column arguing that working women were a national disgrace.
Bly reached New York on January 25, 1890, seventy-two days, six hours and some minutes after she had left, to crowds and cannon fire. A rival magazine had secretly dispatched its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, westward on the same day; Bisland lost by a few days after missing a fast ship. Bly left journalism after marrying an industrialist, ran his manufacturing company for some years, patented improvements to the steel barrel, and later returned to reporting, covering the Eastern Front in the First World War. She died of pneumonia in 1922 at fifty-seven.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Her asylum reporting helped create modern undercover journalism. Having herself committed in order to document conditions from inside produced reform and established a method that investigative reporters have used ever since.
She forced open a field that was closed to women. At a time when women in newspapers were largely restricted to fashion and society pages, she reported on institutions, factories, and political corruption, and her prominence made it harder to argue that women could not do the work.
The race itself showed the world had shrunk. Completing a circuit of the globe in seventy-two days using scheduled steamers and trains demonstrated that the connected transport networks of the late nineteenth century had made a journey of fiction into a matter of timetables.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Nellie Bly left Hoboken on November 14, 1889, with one bag, to beat a fictional record, and came back seventy-two days later to cannon fire. The stunt made her famous. The work that mattered was the ten days she had spent two years earlier inside an asylum, pretending to be mad so she could report what was done to the women there.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.”
— Nellie Bly
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Nellie Bly, her undercover reporting from Blackwell's Island, the race around the world, and the rival reporter sent the other way?
