August 28, 2025 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1890, Nellie Bly set out to do what seemed impossible: circle the globe in less than eighty days. Known to her readers as a bold reporter who once went undercover in a mental asylum, Bly was already a household name. But this journey, inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, would make her a legend. Traveling by ship, train, and carriage, she raced against time and returned to New York in just seventy-two days.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
a history story. And of course, all of our stories
about American history are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn
all the things that are good in life and all
the things that are beautiful in life. If you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with her
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
(00:33):
In this story, you're about to meet someone you've probably
heard of, but probably don't know. She set the world
record for the fastest trip around the world in the
year eighteen ninety and she did it in just seventy
two days. We're talking about Nellie Bly. She wrote a
book about her experiences, but in the life story of
(00:55):
Nellie Bly, this was just a chapter in the middle.
Nellie was born as Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in cochranes Mill, Pennsylvania.
Her Irish immigrant family had been successful enough to have
the town named after her father. Michael Cochrane had ten
children with his first wife, and after she died, he
(01:17):
remarried and had five more, including Nelly. When Michael died,
he left no will protecting his second wife or the
then six year old Nelly. The next years were rough.
Nellie's mother married and then divorced an abusive alcoholic. Nellie
went to school to become a teacher, but couldn't afford
(01:38):
tuition past the first semester. He spent the next few
years working odd jobs around a boarding house. But her
real break came when she read in Exchange in the
Pittsburgh Dispatch. An anxious father wrote in to ask Pittsburgh's
most popular columnist what he should do about his five
(01:59):
unmarried The columnist Erasmus Wilson, wrote a reply titled what
girls are good for? According to Wilson, women belonged in
the home as a working woman was surely a monstrosity,
and he went further to suggest, possibly in jest, the
Americans might just have to kill baby girls. Nelly was
(02:22):
not amused. She wrote a fiery response under the pseudonym
lonely orphaned Girl. The papers additor recognized a good thing
when he saw it, so he took out an ad
asking the mysterious writer to visit his office. When she did,
George Madden offered her a job, and this was also
(02:43):
when she took her pen name of Nellie Bly after
the Stephen Foster song. Nellie covered what the media ignored.
She took a job in a factory and wrote a
series of articles on the conditions facing poor working girls
and women, and a twist straight out of Will Ferrell's Anchorman.
The paper's editors saw this fearless investigator and decided she
(03:06):
would be put to better use writing about fashion and
flower shows for the women's pages. Nellie somehow talked her
way out of this to become the paper's foreign correspondent
in Mexico. There she wrote about the everyday lives of Mexicans,
but took a special interest in how the dictator Dias
had a habit of throwing journalists in prison. So naturally,
(03:27):
the government threatened her with just that unless she left
back in Pittsburgh. The editors weren't going to let her
wiggle out of the Women's pages again, So Nellie did
what you might expect. She left her boss a note
saying simply, I'm off for New York. Look out for me.
Blid Nellie spent six months spenningless trying to break into
(03:51):
the New York scene. She finally got a meeting at
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late eighteen eighties
New york One developing issue was the treatment of patients
in the city's mental institutions, and what might have been
an attempt to brush off this persistent little girl from Pennsylvania.
The New York World's managing editor, John Cockerel, asked Nellie
(04:13):
to write a piece on one of New York's major asylums. Well,
Nellie was game. Actually, that might be a bit of
an understatement. She stopped bathing and brushing her teeth. She
found the most tattered clothes she could. She stayed awake
all night, making faces at herself in the mirror, taking
(04:34):
notes like far away expressions, look crazy. Posing as a
Cuban immigrant Nellie moreno. She checked into a boarding house
and let loose her best crazy act. The staff and
other residents bought it, so did the police, a judge,
and several doctors at Bellevue Hospital's psyche board. Her impression
(04:56):
was so good, in fact, that other newspapers at the
time wrote articles about this so called mysterious waif with
the wild hunted look in her eyes, declaring Nelly bly
to be positively demented. The doctors sent her off to
a women's lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island. This was America's
first municipal mental health hospital, opened in eighteen thirty nine.
(05:21):
Others had reported on conditions in the asylum, including Charles Dickens,
who described it as a very painful experience, but no
journalist was as courageous or creative as Nellie blythe From
the inside, Nelly witnessed the plight of patients surrounded by
oblivious doctors and orderlies who choked, beat and harassed patience.
(05:44):
Some weren't insane at all, just recent immigrant women who
didn't speak English. Regarding the daily conditions of the committed women,
Nelly wrote this quote, what accepting torture would produce insanity
quicker than this treatment. Take a perfectly say sane and
healthy woman. Shut her up and make her sit from
six am to eight pm on straight back benches. Do
(06:06):
not allow her to talk or move during these hours.
Give her no reading and let her know nothing of
the world or its doings. Give her bad food and
harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to
make her insane. Two months would make her a mental
and physical wreck. When the patients weren't kept in isolation,
(06:26):
other so called therapies weren't necessarily better. Quote, my teeth
chattered and my limbs were goose flushed with blue and cold.
Suddenly I got one after another, three buckets of water
over my head, ice cold water too into my eyes,
my ears, my nose, my mouth. I think I experienced
the sensation of drowning as they dragged me, gasping, shivering
(06:50):
and quaking from the tub. For once, I did look insane.
The funny thing is that as soon as Nellie entered
the asylum, she largely dropped her and said act. But
the staff only took that as a further confirmation of
her craziness. After ten days locked up, Nellie's paper sent
a lawyer to get her out, and she went to work.
(07:12):
Her first article ran just two days later. The doctors
and others responsible hemmed and hawd, trying every line in
the book to excuse the inexcusable. A grand jury launched
its own investigation and asked Nellie to assist, because presumably
few of them wanted to experience the rancid food forced
feeding experience firsthand. The story made waves across America, driving
(07:36):
broad reforms in how asylums were run and patients were screened.
Nellie went on to write several investigative and editorial series
on the conditions in New York jails and corruption among legislators.
By eighteen eighty nine, she wanted a change of pace.
Inspired by Jules verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days,
Nellie told her editors she wanted to have a try
(07:58):
at just such an adventure. Her boss was intrigued, but
the people with the checkbooks less so no one had
attempted to make such a trip in so little time. Besides,
she's an unchaper owned woman. When some of the newspaper
management seized on that point, Nellie said, well, very well,
start the man, and I'll start the same day for
some other newspaper and beat him. So Nellie got the
(08:20):
green light. In addition to the dress she was wearing,
Nelly packed a coat, several changes of underwear, a small
bag of toil, trees, and some banknotes and gold. As
she later wrote, it will be seen that if one
is traveling simply for the sake of traveling, and not
for the purpose of impressing one's fellow passengers, the problem
of baggage becomes a simple one. She departed Hoboken, New Jersey,
(08:43):
and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw and burrow. Along
the way, she visited Jules Verne himself in France, stopped
by a leper colony in China, and bought that monkey
in Singapore. Thanks to telegraphs submarine cables, she followed dispatches
along the way, and one of the great media publicity
stunts of the era, she made it home in seventy
(09:05):
two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, beating
both the titular eighty days in her own target time
of seventy five. Back in America, Nelly married and began
working in her husband's business, the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, which
made everything from milk cans to oil drums. She received
patents for her new ideas of a milk container and
(09:28):
stacking garbage cans. When the company went under because of
her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism. She died
at age fifty seven as another fearless American innovator. Our
words are inadequate to describe. Perhaps we should remember this
remarkable woman not just by the fake insanity or her
pet monkey, but by some words that launched her career.
(09:52):
Here is some of her advice to that anxious father
wondering what to do about his poor helpless daughters. Quote
how many healthy and great men could be pointed out
who started in the depths, but where are the many women.
Let a youth start as errand boy, and he will
work his way up until he is one of the firm.
Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn.
(10:13):
Why then can't they do the same, she continued, here
would be a good field for believers in women's rights.
Let them forgo their lecturing and writing and go to work.
More work, less talk. Take some girls that have ability,
procure for them situations, start them on their way, and
(10:34):
by doing so, accomplish more than by years of talking.
Nellie Blygh, what a story, What a classic American story.
Here on our American stories,
And we returned to our American stories, and up next
a history story. And of course, all of our stories
about American history are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn
all the things that are good in life and all
the things that are beautiful in life. If you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with her
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
(00:33):
In this story, you're about to meet someone you've probably
heard of, but probably don't know. She set the world
record for the fastest trip around the world in the
year eighteen ninety and she did it in just seventy
two days. We're talking about Nellie Bly. She wrote a
book about her experiences, but in the life story of
(00:55):
Nellie Bly, this was just a chapter in the middle.
Nellie was born as Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in cochranes Mill, Pennsylvania.
Her Irish immigrant family had been successful enough to have
the town named after her father. Michael Cochrane had ten
children with his first wife, and after she died, he
(01:17):
remarried and had five more, including Nelly. When Michael died,
he left no will protecting his second wife or the
then six year old Nelly. The next years were rough.
Nellie's mother married and then divorced an abusive alcoholic. Nellie
went to school to become a teacher, but couldn't afford
(01:38):
tuition past the first semester. He spent the next few
years working odd jobs around a boarding house. But her
real break came when she read in Exchange in the
Pittsburgh Dispatch. An anxious father wrote in to ask Pittsburgh's
most popular columnist what he should do about his five
(01:59):
unmarried The columnist Erasmus Wilson, wrote a reply titled what
girls are good for? According to Wilson, women belonged in
the home as a working woman was surely a monstrosity,
and he went further to suggest, possibly in jest, the
Americans might just have to kill baby girls. Nelly was
(02:22):
not amused. She wrote a fiery response under the pseudonym
lonely orphaned Girl. The papers additor recognized a good thing
when he saw it, so he took out an ad
asking the mysterious writer to visit his office. When she did,
George Madden offered her a job, and this was also
(02:43):
when she took her pen name of Nellie Bly after
the Stephen Foster song. Nellie covered what the media ignored.
She took a job in a factory and wrote a
series of articles on the conditions facing poor working girls
and women, and a twist straight out of Will Ferrell's Anchorman.
The paper's editors saw this fearless investigator and decided she
(03:06):
would be put to better use writing about fashion and
flower shows for the women's pages. Nellie somehow talked her
way out of this to become the paper's foreign correspondent
in Mexico. There she wrote about the everyday lives of Mexicans,
but took a special interest in how the dictator Dias
had a habit of throwing journalists in prison. So naturally,
(03:27):
the government threatened her with just that unless she left
back in Pittsburgh. The editors weren't going to let her
wiggle out of the Women's pages again, So Nellie did
what you might expect. She left her boss a note
saying simply, I'm off for New York. Look out for me.
Blid Nellie spent six months spenningless trying to break into
(03:51):
the New York scene. She finally got a meeting at
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late eighteen eighties
New york One developing issue was the treatment of patients
in the city's mental institutions, and what might have been
an attempt to brush off this persistent little girl from Pennsylvania.
The New York World's managing editor, John Cockerel, asked Nellie
(04:13):
to write a piece on one of New York's major asylums. Well,
Nellie was game. Actually, that might be a bit of
an understatement. She stopped bathing and brushing her teeth. She
found the most tattered clothes she could. She stayed awake
all night, making faces at herself in the mirror, taking
(04:34):
notes like far away expressions, look crazy. Posing as a
Cuban immigrant Nellie moreno. She checked into a boarding house
and let loose her best crazy act. The staff and
other residents bought it, so did the police, a judge,
and several doctors at Bellevue Hospital's psyche board. Her impression
(04:56):
was so good, in fact, that other newspapers at the
time wrote articles about this so called mysterious waif with
the wild hunted look in her eyes, declaring Nelly bly
to be positively demented. The doctors sent her off to
a women's lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island. This was America's
first municipal mental health hospital, opened in eighteen thirty nine.
(05:21):
Others had reported on conditions in the asylum, including Charles Dickens,
who described it as a very painful experience, but no
journalist was as courageous or creative as Nellie blythe From
the inside, Nelly witnessed the plight of patients surrounded by
oblivious doctors and orderlies who choked, beat and harassed patience.
(05:44):
Some weren't insane at all, just recent immigrant women who
didn't speak English. Regarding the daily conditions of the committed women,
Nelly wrote this quote, what accepting torture would produce insanity
quicker than this treatment. Take a perfectly say sane and
healthy woman. Shut her up and make her sit from
six am to eight pm on straight back benches. Do
(06:06):
not allow her to talk or move during these hours.
Give her no reading and let her know nothing of
the world or its doings. Give her bad food and
harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to
make her insane. Two months would make her a mental
and physical wreck. When the patients weren't kept in isolation,
(06:26):
other so called therapies weren't necessarily better. Quote, my teeth
chattered and my limbs were goose flushed with blue and cold.
Suddenly I got one after another, three buckets of water
over my head, ice cold water too into my eyes,
my ears, my nose, my mouth. I think I experienced
the sensation of drowning as they dragged me, gasping, shivering
(06:50):
and quaking from the tub. For once, I did look insane.
The funny thing is that as soon as Nellie entered
the asylum, she largely dropped her and said act. But
the staff only took that as a further confirmation of
her craziness. After ten days locked up, Nellie's paper sent
a lawyer to get her out, and she went to work.
(07:12):
Her first article ran just two days later. The doctors
and others responsible hemmed and hawd, trying every line in
the book to excuse the inexcusable. A grand jury launched
its own investigation and asked Nellie to assist, because presumably
few of them wanted to experience the rancid food forced
feeding experience firsthand. The story made waves across America, driving
(07:36):
broad reforms in how asylums were run and patients were screened.
Nellie went on to write several investigative and editorial series
on the conditions in New York jails and corruption among legislators.
By eighteen eighty nine, she wanted a change of pace.
Inspired by Jules verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days,
Nellie told her editors she wanted to have a try
(07:58):
at just such an adventure. Her boss was intrigued, but
the people with the checkbooks less so no one had
attempted to make such a trip in so little time. Besides,
she's an unchaper owned woman. When some of the newspaper
management seized on that point, Nellie said, well, very well,
start the man, and I'll start the same day for
some other newspaper and beat him. So Nellie got the
(08:20):
green light. In addition to the dress she was wearing,
Nelly packed a coat, several changes of underwear, a small
bag of toil, trees, and some banknotes and gold. As
she later wrote, it will be seen that if one
is traveling simply for the sake of traveling, and not
for the purpose of impressing one's fellow passengers, the problem
of baggage becomes a simple one. She departed Hoboken, New Jersey,
(08:43):
and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw and burrow. Along
the way, she visited Jules Verne himself in France, stopped
by a leper colony in China, and bought that monkey
in Singapore. Thanks to telegraphs submarine cables, she followed dispatches
along the way, and one of the great media publicity
stunts of the era, she made it home in seventy
(09:05):
two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, beating
both the titular eighty days in her own target time
of seventy five. Back in America, Nelly married and began
working in her husband's business, the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, which
made everything from milk cans to oil drums. She received
patents for her new ideas of a milk container and
(09:28):
stacking garbage cans. When the company went under because of
her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism. She died
at age fifty seven as another fearless American innovator. Our
words are inadequate to describe. Perhaps we should remember this
remarkable woman not just by the fake insanity or her
pet monkey, but by some words that launched her career.
(09:52):
Here is some of her advice to that anxious father
wondering what to do about his poor helpless daughters. Quote
how many healthy and great men could be pointed out
who started in the depths, but where are the many women.
Let a youth start as errand boy, and he will
work his way up until he is one of the firm.
Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn.
(10:13):
Why then can't they do the same, she continued, here
would be a good field for believers in women's rights.
Let them forgo their lecturing and writing and go to work.
More work, less talk. Take some girls that have ability,
procure for them situations, start them on their way, and
(10:34):
by doing so, accomplish more than by years of talking.
Nellie Blygh, what a story, What a classic American story.
Here on our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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