September 7, 2026 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1890, Nellie Bly completed a journey that seemed almost impossible, circling the globe in just 72 days. Inspired by Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly traveled by ship, train, horse, rickshaw, and more, even stopping in France to meet Verne himself. But her famous race around the world was only one chapter in the remarkable life of one of America's most fearless journalists.
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania, Bly challenged expectations about what women could do, reported on the lives of factory workers, confronted political repression in Mexico, and famously went undercover inside a New York City mental asylum to expose the horrific treatment of its patients. Our own Lee Habeeb shares the story of the pioneering reporter, adventurer, inventor, and businesswoman who refused to accept the limits placed on women in her time.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
Support the show: https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we return 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 their
free and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu. In this story,
(00:34):
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 1890. And
she did it in just 72 days. We're talking about
Nellie Bly. She wrote a book about her experiences. But
in the life story of Nellie Bly, this was just
(00:57):
a chapter in the middle. Nellie was born as Elizabeth
Jane Cochran in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania. Her Irish immigrant family
had been successful enough to have the town named after
her father. Michael Cochran had ten children with his first wife,
and after she died, he remarried and had five more,
(01:19):
including Nellie. When Michael died, he left no will protecting
his second wife or the then six-year-old Nellie. 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 tuition. past the first semester. She spent
(01:41):
the next few years working odd jobs around a boarding house,
but her real break came when she read an exchange
in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. An anxious father wrote in to
ask Pittsburgh's most popular columnist what he should do about
his five unmarried daughters. The columnist Erasmus Wilson wrote a
(02:03):
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, that Americans might just have to kill baby girls.
Nellie was not amused. She wrote a fiery response under
(02:26):
the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl. The paper's editor 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 when she took her pen name of
Nellie Bly, after the Stephen Foster song. Nellie covered what
(02:52):
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. In a twist straight out
of Will Ferrell's Anchorman, the paper's editors saw this fearless
investigator and decided, she would be put to better use
writing about fashion and flower shows for the women's pages.
(03:12):
Nelly 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 Diaz had a habit of throwing
journalists in prison. So naturally, the government threatened her with
just that, unless she left. Back in Pittsburgh, the editors
(03:34):
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. Bly. Nellie spent six
months penniless, trying to break into the New York scene.
She finally got a meeting at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.
(03:57):
In the late 1880s, New York was... One developing issue
is the treatment of patients in the city's mental institutions.
In what might have been an attempt to brush off
this persistent little girl from Pennsylvania, the New York World's
managing editor, John Cockerell, asked Nellie to write a piece
on one of New York's major asylums. Well, Nellie was game. Actually,
(04:21):
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 notes like, faraway expressions
look crazy. Posing as a Cuban immigrant, Nelly Moreno, she
(04:42):
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 psych ward. Her impression 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.
(05:07):
Declaring Nellie 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 1839.
Others had reported on conditions in the asylum, including Charles Dickens,
who described it as a very painful experience. But no
(05:30):
journalist was as courageous or creative as Nellie Bly. From
the inside, Nellie witnessed the plight of patients surrounded by
oblivious doctors and orderlies who choked, beat, and harassed patients.
Some weren't insane at all, just recent immigrant women who
didn't speak English. Regarding the daily conditions of the committed women,
(05:51):
Nellie wrote this, quote, What accepting torture would produce insanity
quicker than than this treatment. Take a perfectly sane and
healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from
6am to 8pm on straight back benches. Do 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
(06:15):
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, Other so-called therapies
weren't necessarily better. Quote, My teeth chattered and my limbs
were goose-fleshed with blue and cold. Suddenly I got, one
(06:36):
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, 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
(06:59):
insane 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. Her first article ran just two
days later. The doctors and others responsible hemmed and hawed,
trying every line in the book to excuse the inexcusable.
(07:22):
A grand jury launched its own investigation and asked Nellie
to assist because presumably few of them wanted to experience
the rancid food force-feeding experience firsthand. The story made waves
across America, driving 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
(07:44):
jails and corruption among legislators. By 1889, she wanted a
change of pace. Inspired by a Jules Verne novel around
the world in 80 days, Nellie told her editor she
wanted to have a try 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
(08:07):
trip in so little time. Besides, she's an unchaperoned 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 green light. In addition to the
dress she was wearing, Nellie packed a coat, several changes
of underwear, a small bag of toil trees, and some
(08:28):
banknotes in 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, and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw,
and burrow. Along the way, she visited Jules Verne himself
(08:50):
in France, stopped by a leper colony in China, and
bought that monkey in Singapore. Thanks to telegraph submarine cables,
she filed dispatches along the way in one of the
great media publicity stunts of the era. She made it
home in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds,
beating both the titular 80 days and her own target
(09:12):
time of 75. Back in America... Nellie married and began
working at 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
stacking garbage cans. When the company went under because of
her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism. She died
(09:37):
at age 57. 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. Here is
some of her advice to that anxious father wondering what
to do about his poor, helpless daughters. Quote, She continued,
(10:18):
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
by doing so accomplish more than by years of talking.
(10:40):
Nellie Bly, what a story, what a classic American story
here on Our American Stories.
And we return 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 their
free and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu. In this story,
(00:34):
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 1890. And
she did it in just 72 days. We're talking about
Nellie Bly. She wrote a book about her experiences. But
in the life story of Nellie Bly, this was just
(00:57):
a chapter in the middle. Nellie was born as Elizabeth
Jane Cochran in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania. Her Irish immigrant family
had been successful enough to have the town named after
her father. Michael Cochran had ten children with his first wife,
and after she died, he remarried and had five more,
(01:19):
including Nellie. When Michael died, he left no will protecting
his second wife or the then six-year-old Nellie. 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 tuition. past the first semester. She spent
(01:41):
the next few years working odd jobs around a boarding house,
but her real break came when she read an exchange
in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. An anxious father wrote in to
ask Pittsburgh's most popular columnist what he should do about
his five unmarried daughters. The columnist Erasmus Wilson wrote a
(02:03):
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, that Americans might just have to kill baby girls.
Nellie was not amused. She wrote a fiery response under
(02:26):
the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl. The paper's editor 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 when she took her pen name of
Nellie Bly, after the Stephen Foster song. Nellie covered what
(02:52):
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. In a twist straight out
of Will Ferrell's Anchorman, the paper's editors saw this fearless
investigator and decided, she would be put to better use
writing about fashion and flower shows for the women's pages.
(03:12):
Nelly 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 Diaz had a habit of throwing
journalists in prison. So naturally, the government threatened her with
just that, unless she left. Back in Pittsburgh, the editors
(03:34):
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. Bly. Nellie spent six
months penniless, trying to break into the New York scene.
She finally got a meeting at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.
(03:57):
In the late 1880s, New York was... One developing issue
is the treatment of patients in the city's mental institutions.
In what might have been an attempt to brush off
this persistent little girl from Pennsylvania, the New York World's
managing editor, John Cockerell, asked Nellie to write a piece
on one of New York's major asylums. Well, Nellie was game. Actually,
(04:21):
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 notes like, faraway expressions
look crazy. Posing as a Cuban immigrant, Nelly Moreno, she
(04:42):
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 psych ward. Her impression 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.
(05:07):
Declaring Nellie 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 1839.
Others had reported on conditions in the asylum, including Charles Dickens,
who described it as a very painful experience. But no
(05:30):
journalist was as courageous or creative as Nellie Bly. From
the inside, Nellie witnessed the plight of patients surrounded by
oblivious doctors and orderlies who choked, beat, and harassed patients.
Some weren't insane at all, just recent immigrant women who
didn't speak English. Regarding the daily conditions of the committed women,
(05:51):
Nellie wrote this, quote, What accepting torture would produce insanity
quicker than than this treatment. Take a perfectly sane and
healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from
6am to 8pm on straight back benches. Do 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
(06:15):
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, Other so-called therapies
weren't necessarily better. Quote, My teeth chattered and my limbs
were goose-fleshed with blue and cold. Suddenly I got, one
(06:36):
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, 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
(06:59):
insane 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. Her first article ran just two
days later. The doctors and others responsible hemmed and hawed,
trying every line in the book to excuse the inexcusable.
(07:22):
A grand jury launched its own investigation and asked Nellie
to assist because presumably few of them wanted to experience
the rancid food force-feeding experience firsthand. The story made waves
across America, driving 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
(07:44):
jails and corruption among legislators. By 1889, she wanted a
change of pace. Inspired by a Jules Verne novel around
the world in 80 days, Nellie told her editor she
wanted to have a try 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
(08:07):
trip in so little time. Besides, she's an unchaperoned 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 green light. In addition to the
dress she was wearing, Nellie packed a coat, several changes
of underwear, a small bag of toil trees, and some
(08:28):
banknotes in 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, and journeyed by ship, rail, horse, rickshaw,
and burrow. Along the way, she visited Jules Verne himself
(08:50):
in France, stopped by a leper colony in China, and
bought that monkey in Singapore. Thanks to telegraph submarine cables,
she filed dispatches along the way in one of the
great media publicity stunts of the era. She made it
home in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds,
beating both the titular 80 days and her own target
(09:12):
time of 75. Back in America... Nellie married and began
working at 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
stacking garbage cans. When the company went under because of
her embezzling employees, Nellie went back to journalism. She died
(09:37):
at age 57. 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. Here is
some of her advice to that anxious father wondering what
to do about his poor, helpless daughters. Quote, She continued,
(10:18):
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
by doing so accomplish more than by years of talking.
(10:40):
Nellie Bly, what a story, what a classic American story
here on Our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!