Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly was one of the most famous journalists on earth, a trailblazer who forged a unique path through an industry in which few women had ever worked. Challenging powerful institutions and exposing hidden injustice, she chased danger across continents, shocking readers with the places she was willing to go in pursuit of a story. But how did an ordinary young woman convince major editors to give her a chance to become a pioneer in journalism? What drove her to fake insanity in order to expose abuse inside a New York asylum? And how did she help change not just journalism, but the way women could move through the modern world? This is a Short History Of Nellie Bly. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Brooke Kroeger, journalist and author of Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. Written by Lizzie Enfield | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Mirianna Pitman-Latham | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:56Speaker 02

  It is October 1887 in the women's lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island, standing in New York's East River. On a narrow iron bed, a 23-year-old woman going by the name Nellie Brown lies, listening, as another patient cries out somewhere along the corridor.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Now, a female warden marches into the ward and orders the patients to rise. Nellie, who has been here less than a day, sits up immediately, but most move slowly, staring blankly ahead.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  The breakfast bell rings, and she joins the other patients as they shuffle into a long hall where thin, sour-smelling gruel is ladled into tin bowls. Nellie finds a place to sit. To her left is a frail young woman whispering anxiously to herself in German. On her other side is an older patient, rocking silently back and forth, seemingly oblivious to a nurse who passes, berating her and demanding she sit still.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  As soon as the meager meal is over, the women are marched towards the washroom. Their attendants force them to strip before throwing buckets of icy water over their heads.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Shivering so hard she can barely dress herself, after what passes as a bath here, Nellie looks up and catches the eye of another inmate, a middle-aged woman who'd spoken kindly to her when she arrived yesterday. She had insisted she wasn't mad, that she'd been sent here by her husband, who had taken up with another woman and wanted her out of the way. Nellie can't help but believe her. She seems angry and exhausted, but aren't those sane responses to what she's experiencing?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Filing out of the washroom, Nellie tries to speak to another patient. Through mime and broken English, the woman explains that she came to America looking for work. She doesn't understand how she's ended up in this place.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Though she's been here just a short time, Nellie has heard several similar stories. What she hasn't offered in return is that she has been locked up among them by her own volition.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Because outside of the asylum, she is better known as Nellie Bly, an investigative reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. And she volunteered to come here to discover the truth about what happens inside these walls.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  In their damp clothes, the women are marched from the washroom into the long, bare room where they must spend much of their days. Straight-backed wooden benches line the walls. One by one, the patients are directed onto them until the room is filled with silent, motionless figures, forbidden to speak.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Nellie lowers herself onto the hard bench between two women wrapped tightly in thin shawls. The silence stretches out, and the cold seeps into every inch of Nellie's flesh, but there is nothing to be done. Every time a woman speaks, she is silenced with a swift rebuke.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  And as the hours pass, Nellie understands something deeply unsettling. This is not treatment. It is a brutal regime which will surely induce madness in even the most sanguine. And, as its victims have been deprived not just of their dignity and freedom, but also their voices, it's up to her to tell the world about it.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Nellie Bly was one of the most famous journalists on Earth, a trailblazer who forged a unique path through an industry in which few women had ever worked. Challenging powerful institutions and exposing hidden injustice, she chased danger across continents, shocking readers with the places she was willing to go in pursuit of a story.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  But how did an ordinary young woman convince major editors to give her a chance to become a pioneer in journalism? What drove her to fake insanity in order to expose abuse inside a New York asylum and risk her life and reputation in pursuit of a story? And how did she help change not just journalism, but the way women could move through the modern world?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Nellie Bly.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  The woman who will become famous under the pen name Nellie Bly is born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in 1864 in a small town around 30 miles from Pittsburgh. The family is enormous, combining the 10 children her father had with his late first wife and the five he fathers with Nellie's mother, Mary Jane.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Vibrant and energetic, Elizabeth stands out from an early age and is known as "Pink", thanks to the bright colors her mother dresses her in. Her father, Michael Cochrane, is a mill owner and local judge, and the family is comfortable and respected.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  But that security does not last. When Elizabeth is just six years old, her father dies without leaving a will, and the stable life she has known is upended.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Brooke Kroger is a journalist, author, and writer of "Nellie Bly: Daredevil Reporter Feminist."

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So remember, there are 15 children of Michael Cochrane. He dies, the estate is divided, a third for the widow's dowry, and the rest divided among all these children. So, nobody got very much.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Elizabeth's mother remarries businessman John Jackson Ford, hoping the marriage will provide the security she needs for her five children. But Ford drinks, and when the relationship turns abusive, she takes the rare step of filing for divorce. She is forced to present evidence of cruelty in open court. But then Elizabeth also takes the stand, speaking publicly about her stepfather's alcoholism and violence.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Nellie, at 14 years old, testifies at the trial. The testimony is on record. It was quite remarkable. It's handwritten by a transcriber, obviously. But what she reports, having seen the real abuse of her mother and growing up in that household, this is her formative experience.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Her testimony helps secure the divorce the following year.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  It is an early glimpse of the quality that will define her life, a willingness to speak out when convention tells women to keep quiet.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  When Elizabeth is 15, her mother uses the little money she has left to enroll her in the Indiana State Normal School, where she begins training as a teacher, one of the few professions readily available to women at the time. But the money runs out, and after just one semester, she is forced to leave.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Plunged into financial hardship, the family moves to Pittsburgh, where Nellie helps her mother run a boarding house. They have a roof over their heads, but not a whole lot more.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  That whole constellation of issues creates her, in my opinion. She is mostly driven not by the desire to become a journalist. It is the desire to accumulate wealth and support her family. That is really what she is after, and a better life for herself, the life she feels she was born to for herself.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Elizabeth works in childcare to supplement the family income. With little formal education, her options for advancement are limited, but she remains determined and outspoken. It's only a matter of time before her circumstances and character combine to change the course of her fortunes.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Her new home of Pittsburgh is a booming industrial center, driven mainly by steel, coal, and manufacturing. Luckily for Elizabeth, it also has a lively and competitive newspaper industry.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  In 1885, she reads a column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch entitled, "What Girls Are Good For." Its argument is blunt. Paid work should remain the domain of men, and women belong in the home.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  It just enrages her because she is looking for real work. And he is basically saying, young women who are now trying their muscle in the workforce are getting in the way of young men who need jobs, not really understanding that among the human beings involved, there are people who need to earn a living for their family, who happen also to be women.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  She sends a response under the pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl. The editor, George Madden, is so impressed that he places a notice in the paper asking for the anonymous writer to identify herself. When she comes forward, he offers her a job.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  The incredibly amazing thing that happens, and any journalist listening will know how extraordinary this is. The editor looks at the letter, says, "Oh, the grammar's terrible, the syntax is terrible, but I see a spirit here. Bring this girl in." So he actually runs an ad in the paper. Would she come forward? Which she does, and gets the job.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  It's both a stroke of luck for Elizabeth and a shrewd move by Madden, who understands the value of his female readers.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  You suddenly realize this is a whole readership that we can attract who advertisers want to appeal to, because they're consumers. So, it's very, very practical in that sense. He's going to overlook everything not okay about her and say, "Bring this girl in and let's have a look."

• 11:19Speaker 02

  But though the women's sections that have recently begun appearing in newspapers tend to cover uncontroversial domestic subjects, Elizabeth's first published piece is written in response to the column that sparked her letter. In the article entitled "The Girl Puzzle", she challenges widely-accepted gender norms, arguing for broader opportunities for women's careers and education. Instead of using her real name, she publishes under the byline "Nellie Bly", launching the pseudonym that will one day be known around the world.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  She is now a rookie reporter, albeit one earning $5 a week, half that of a man doing the same job. But while the dispatch has opened a door to her, many still remain closed.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Women at this point are being hired into newspapers to do this gut work. They're hired to do the behind-the-scenes things, book reviews, gossip, flower shows. This is what they're asked to do, and this is absolutely what she does not want to do.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  What she wants to do is make waves. She has plenty of ideas, and she's not afraid of going after the story.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  One such pitch involves looking at the conditions in some of Pittsburgh's factories to find out what life is like for the many women and children who work in them. Bly persuades the dispatch to let her investigate. But this strict stage management of her visits presents a major obstacle.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  So she gets the assignment, but she's young and not very experienced. So of course, this is all organized through the management of the firms. And she realizes she is not going to get to talk a lot about child labor. She is not going to get to talk a lot about how awful the working conditions are because she's being guided by the management's view of this situation. But she can get in a line from an eight-year-old, you know, there's a little, like, hints of what she's trying to get at. That experience teaches her that if you don't go undercover, you're not going to get the real story in situations where people are trying to hide information from you.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Soon, she moves to an issue closer to her heart. Drawing on her own experience, she examines the difficulties women face in unhappy or abusive marriages.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  She criticizes laws that make it hard for women to divorce or achieve financial independence, often using interviews or case studies of wives trapped in restrictive domestic situations.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Readers are captivated and unsettled in equal measure, with many shocked by her coverage of stories that have traditionally been off-limits.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  But the pioneering approach does not go down well with the paper's advertisers, who are by nature averse to upsetting their paying readers. She's moved away from reporting and back to the women's pages. But if anything, the attempt to sideline her only sharpens her ambition. She has discovered that telling uncomfortable truths can make powerful people nervous, and she likes that.

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• 17:24Speaker 02

  Though reporting on foreign affairs from abroad remains overwhelmingly male territory, one of the ways female reporters can break out of the women's pages is through travel writing.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  In 1886, after just two years in Pittsburgh, she persuades her editor to send her to Mexico.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Politically stable but undemocratic, the nation has seen rapid economic growth, which creates prosperity alongside grinding poverty. These stark contrasts make it appealing to American journalists and travel writers, drawn by its accessibility, exotic culture, and growing importance to US business interests. Being young and unmarried, Bly is unable to travel alone.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  So when she sets off on the journey of almost 2,000 miles to the border, she does so with her mother in tow as a chaperone, determined to make a name for herself.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Well, she does a lot of diary-like stuff, travelogue. What struck me most about it was her skill at interviewing is already coming out. She asks the question nobody thinks to ask. Like, she's watching a bullfight, and she's wondering, "How do they keep their britches up?" You know, asking some oblique question that makes her writing kind of preposterous and interesting and engaging, like a train wreck, all the time. You know, you're always taken on by her voice and by her mind, you know, the way she thinks about things.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Over six months, she sends regular dispatches back to Pittsburgh. There, the dispatch publishes them under recurring headlines like "Nellie in Mexico", turning her into part of the story.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  As she travels, she speaks to anyone and everyone, from officials to laborers, journalists to shopkeepers, not to mention dissidents.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Thanks to Bly's gift for persuading people to speak candidly despite the risks, a picture emerges of censorship, corruption, and a press that survives only by avoiding any condemnation of the regime.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  She tries to show some political sophistication at a certain point. At the end of the five months, she gets herself in some trouble because she talks about some journalists who've been subjected to censorship that she shouldn't have talked about.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Though much of her work is more gossip than hard-nosed investigation, she understands the risks of exposing things others want to keep hidden. Having reported on cases of journalists imprisoned for criticizing the regime, she has seen for herself the appalling conditions inside Mexican jails. The last thing she wants is to end up in one herself.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  It is spring 1886, in a bustling marketplace in Mexico City. Nellie Blye weaves between tables and blankets piled high with goods.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  She walks with unhurried calm, taking in the bright piles of produce for sale. But she does not stop. Because the leisurely air she projects is an act. She urgently needs to get back to her boarding house, find her mother, and gather their things. Earlier this morning, she received word that her reports for the Dispatch have been seen by the Mexican authorities, and they are not happy. If she doesn't get out soon, she could be arrested. Keeping a sharp eye out for anyone who might be police, she heads from the market and onto the street leading towards her temporary home.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  After a few minutes, she arrives outside the boarding house, wedged between a tobacconist's and a tailor's shop. Nellie mounts the worn stone steps two at a time and pushes through the heavy front door.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  She hurries across the tiled hallway and up the narrow wooden staircase, listening for anything suggesting the authorities have beaten her to it.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  As she reaches the top landing and unlocks the door, she finds her mother is already there, anxiously gathering belongings from the washstand and bed.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  One look passes between them, enough to confirm the danger without explanation.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Nellie moves quickly, pulling dresses from hooks, folding clothes into a case, gathering notebooks and loose papers from the bedside table. Minutes later, carrying their bags, the two women descend the stairs and step back out into the heat of the morning,

• 22:04Speaker 02

  where a waiting carriage stands ready at the curb.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  They climb in, and after a short ride, the rail station comes into view, and the horses slow to a stop.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  The women quickly make their way to the platform, which is mercifully busy enough with passengers and porters to make it easy to blend in. Gripping her own case, Nellie's mother reaches quietly for her hand. She squeezes it once, briefly, before letting go when the hiss of steam signals the arrival of their train.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  They climb aboard quickly, moving down the narrow corridor of the carriage as passengers settle into their seats around them. A whistle blows, and soon they're watching through the window as the countryside slides by.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  But although they're past some of the danger, they're not yet beyond it. The American border is still days away, and until they cross it, she must remain vigilant. Every stranger could be an official sent to intercept her. Every stop could be the one at which she is forced from the train and turned back. If she reaches the safety of the United States, she will have escaped with the final installment of an astonishing story.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  If she does not, she may vanish into the punitive system of a regime she has challenged in print.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  By the time Nellie makes it home, she has done more than enough to establish herself as a serious reporter, someone worthy of recognition, respect, and money. Or so she thinks.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  This was like her first professional, big-risk idea. And remember, she's not doing it for the risk. She is fearless. I mean, she is a daredevil. But she's doing it to establish herself in this field. She wants to be preeminent, and she is going after that in the ways that she thinks can get her there. And they assign her to write theater.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  The message she returns to is clear. Even after risk, even after success, the boundaries remain.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  So, in 1887, aged 23, she says goodbye to her mother and siblings and leaves Pittsburgh to take her chances in New York.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Nellie arrives broke, unemployed, and naïve about the realistic prospect of finding decent work. Though she might have had a lucky break back home, here in the center of America's media, no one is looking to hire a 23-year-old woman with a couple of years' experience on a Pittsburgh paper.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Male editors are crusty and set in their ways and think a certain thing about women. They believe that women are not good value. You know, they need a chaperone to go out at night. You don't want to send them on a dangerous assignment. We don't even think you're capable of doing it because of your limited brain power. I mean, they have all these stereotypes that are ingrained in the culture and have been for 300 years. She thought it would be nothing. She had great recommendations. She had letters of entree. She had all the things you need. And she was getting nowhere, because it's New York, the media capital of the universe. She is getting nowhere. She is from provincial Pittsburgh, and that is how she is viewed.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  For months, she struggles, living cheaply off what meager earnings she can scrape together, filing occasional freelance pieces back to the Pittsburgh Dispatch. But every way she turns, she finds closed doors. She cannot get anywhere near a New York editor, let alone pitch an idea to one. Nellie Blye, however, is nothing if not resourceful. Turning the situation to her advantage, she writes a piece about the workplace realities for women journalists and the kind of stories they ordinarily get to cover if they get hired at all.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  What they're good at, gossip, society, fashion, they don't want to do. But of course, these are the things that men absolutely don't want to do. So that is what women are managing to get hired for. So that story, which she publishes in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, goes what we would today call viral. It's everywhere. And it really gives her a marker to find her way in the door in New York.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Off the back of this story, she persuades Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World" to give her an assignment. It is audacious, even by the standards of the era. The plan is to fake insanity, get herself committed to the women's lunatic asylum on what is now Roosevelt Island, and report from the inside. To prepare, she practices a wide-eyed, demented stare in front of a boarding house mirror. Then, after going without sleep for some time to complete the look, she starts speaking incoherently, dropping in some of the Spanish she learned on assignment in Mexico. Witnessing her act, her landlady calls the police, and after a doctor's examination lasting less than 10 minutes,

• 27:26Speaker 02

  a judge signs the committal order.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  What she finds in her new home is even worse than she imagined. This time, there is no stage management of what she gets to see, and much of what the institution has to offer, she experiences firsthand. The freezing baths, the rotten food, the filth, the cruelty, and the women who do not appear insane at all.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  After a week and a half, the world arranges her release. Her exposé, later published as "10 Days in a Madhouse," causes a sensation. But it also prompts official scrutiny, leading to reform, including increased funding for the asylum.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  She forces those in a position of power to act. There is an investigation. There is a grand jury. There is a tour of the facility. Much of what she says can't be corroborated because, of course, they've cleaned things up and fired some people before the grand jury can convene. But there is real impact. They raise the appropriation for this facility by a very substantial amount. She has what every journalist tries to do: expose wrong and get those in a position of power to act. This is the gold standard.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  And it does wonders for her career, too. Her pioneering of a new style of investigative reporting that becomes known as stunt journalism makes Nellie Blye famous.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  This is really the be-all and end-all. It really is. I mean, everything else she did is interesting and remarkable and terrific, and yay for Nellie. But this was so astounding.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  After the asylum story, Bly becomes one of the most recognizable reporters in America. She continues to work undercover, gaining fame for her immersive journalism, exposing social issues by experiencing them firsthand. In one investigation, she poses as a prospective parent hoping to adopt an infant, revealing how vulnerable children can be bought and sold. She goes undercover in a box factory to document the harsh realities faced by working women, and exposes the unsanitary, overcrowded living conditions endured by many of New York's poorer inhabitants.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  It's not long before other reporters want in on the action.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  So then, in her wake, immediately come a battalion of young women with names like Dorothy Dare and Holly Pry and whatever else, doing exactly sort of what Nellie is doing. After Nellie, the World sets up someone called Meg Merrilies, who doesn't exist, so that nobody would get as big a reputation as Nellie got, because who wants that head in your midst? And then they just run a whole bunch of girls through the name Meg Merrilies to do stunts. So the stunts are up in a balloon, down in a diving bell, I'm putting on a bulletproof vest, shoot me. They just do the gamut.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  And so that's why it gets its moniker of stunt journalism, because a lot of this was stunts, which brought readership.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Stunt journalism opens up a whole new field for female reporters, allowing them to move off the women's sections and onto the front pages. But for Bly, it becomes a new kind of constraint. The very thing that made her famous begins to define and limit her. After three or four years, she's looking to escape.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  The opportunity presents itself in 1889, when she finds a way to turn her skill of blending reporting, nerve, and public appeal into the biggest story of her life.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Inspired by Jules Verne's hugely popular 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly proposes a thrilling new project. She will circle the globe herself and beat the fictional record.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Her editor at the New York World initially rejects the plan, dismissing it as too dangerous and difficult for a woman. He argues she would need a male companion and need too much luggage, and even suggests that a man should be sent instead. Her reply is both characteristic and persuasive. If they send a man, she will leave, make the journey for a rival newspaper, and beat him. Understanding by now who he's dealing with, the editor relents. So it is that on November the 14th, 1889, she sets out to circumnavigate the globe.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Dressed in what will become her signature black and white houndstooth coat, and carrying just a small bag and a few hundred dollars, she boards a steamship from New Jersey to England. Despite considerable bouts of seasickness, she presses on through France to Egypt, Hong Kong, Japan, and China, using ships, trains, rickshaws, and even the occasional horse. Her dispatches are brief. She is in a race against time, and there is little opportunity to linger or fully explore the places she visits. But she tells her readers enough about her meeting with Jules Verne in France or her purchase of a pet monkey named McGinty in Singapore. There's even a moment when she encounters a rival journalist, Elizabeth Bisland,

• 33:04Speaker 02

  attempting the same journey in the opposite direction.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Back home, readers follow her progress avidly. The New York World turns her journey into a national event, even running a contest for readers to guess her return time.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  The World is vamping. I mean, they're running a story every day, they are having guessing games, they create the board game, they have geography lessons. I mean, they're doing anything they can to keep interest going, because the entire country is following Nellie Bly on this journey.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  By the time she arrives back in the States, she is no longer a mere journalist, but a global celebrity.

• 33:48Speaker 05

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• 35:14Speaker 00

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• 35:45Speaker 02

  It is January the 21st, 1890. And after 68 days circling the globe, Nellie Bly is standing on the deck of a steamship as San Francisco Harbor comes into view.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  The air is sharp with salt and coal smoke. Ahead, the city rises through a light haze as tugboats chug across the water, their whistles cutting through the morning air. Even before the ship docks, Nellie can see movement along the waterfront. Clusters of people gather at the pier, men in hats shading their eyes, waving hanker chiefs in the air, a ripple of anticipation spreading through them all as the vessel draws closer.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  The news of her journey has crossed the country faster than she has. Every leg, every delay, every mile gained or lost has been printed and reprinted. But still, it takes her a moment to realize that this crowd has gathered here for her. The vessel slows and is skewered with ropes, and as the gangway is lowered, the noise swells. She steps down into the crowd, reporters pressing forward, notebooks in hand. Voices call her name, shouting questions, but there's no time to give them any answers. Even after weeks at sea, she can't waste a moment. Representatives from the New York World are already waiting, cutting through the crowd, ushering her urgently forwards.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Just as it has been since she set out almost 10 weeks ago, everything is about speed. She is guided quickly from the dock, past the crush of onlookers, towards a waiting carriage. The harbor, the city, the spectacle of her arrival, all of it passes in a blur. One journey has come to an end, but another is now beginning.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Within minutes, she is on her way to the station. There, waiting for her is a special train arranged in advance for a single purpose, to carry Nellie Bly across America as fast as possible. The moment she's on board, the train pulls out with a lurch. As she settles into the final leg of the journey, outside, the landscape transforms. Hours and then days pass as coastline gives way to mountains, mountains to plains. Snow appears in places. At towns and cities along the route, people gather at the tracks just to glimpse her. Crowds wave as the train roars past.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  At last, just before 4:00 PM on January the 25th, the train begins to slow as it pulls into Jersey City Station. Thousands of people line the platforms, hopeful of a glimpse of her through the clouds of steam.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  There is a final lurch as the brakes are applied. Nellie adjusts her coat, takes a breath, and then the carriage door opens.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  With the noise of the jubilant crowd surging all around her, she steps down, completing the journey in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes. As she is swallowed by the crowd of journalists and well-wishers, cannon fire sounds from the battery across the water announcing to New York that Nellie Bly has arrived.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  At just 25 years old, she has traveled around the world faster than anyone before her. For the thousands watching and the millions reading, Nellie Bly is no longer just a journalist. She is proof that a woman can do what the world has always said she cannot.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  The trip cements her place as a celebrity reporter, but it also marks the beginning of a turning point in her career.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Though her journey has dramatically boosted newspaper sales, the reality of her success does not match the recognition she expects.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Her editor, Joseph Pulitzer, fails to properly honor her achievement, promising a medal that never comes. Though she receives a bonus, she also gets the strong sense that the paper valued the story more than the woman who had made it possible. Angered by the lack of appreciation, Bly leaves her post. At first, it seems she no longer needs journalism. She embarks on a lecture tour and tries her hand at writing popular fiction, but neither path proves sustainable. The novels fail to find success, and the excitement surrounding her journey begins to fade.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Within a few years, she finds herself drawn back to reporting, although she is no longer the same journalist.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Moving away from stunts to focus on building a reputation as a serious interviewer, she speaks with figures like Susan B. Anthony, a leading light in the women's suffrage movement, and radical political activist Emma Goldman.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  But lives, like Bly's, rarely move in straight lines. And the next reinvention is one almost no one would have predicted.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  In 1895, at the age of 31, Nellie Bly marries Robert Livingston Seaman. A wealthy New York industrialist, he owns the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, which produces steel goods for an industrializing America. He also happens to be 40 years her senior.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  To the public, it is bewildering. Here is a woman who has spent her career curating an image of the ultimate modern woman: independent, restless, impossible to contain. Now, she appears to be stepping into the most conventional role imaginable as the young wife of an elderly millionaire.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  She is gold-digging. There is just no doubt about it. And, you know, there may have been a little affection, but it didn't last long, though she stays with the marriage the first eight years he lasts.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  The marriage brings Bly money, status, and a foothold in a world that appears very different from the newsroom.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  She moves in with her new husband. But though it's certainly a respectable address, it's far from a happy home.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  He has a gloomy, bleak townhouse on 37th Street. It had never been renovated, and he lives there with his brother, who, of course, is not very happy to have her come along. She is going out every night to eat with friends, to have dinner with friends, because the table is so awful in the house, as she will report.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Suspicious of his new wife's movements, Seaman even hires a detective to follow her. But though the household is tense and the marriage uneasy, Bly is determined to endure it and shifts her attention towards the source of Seaman's wealth.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  After his death in 1904, she takes over Ironclad herself. She now becomes a serious business leader, running a manufacturing concern in a field almost entirely dominated by men.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And she is not merely a figurehead. Bly involves herself in operations, promotion, and product development. Patents are registered in her name for improvements to steel containers. And though she may or may not originate every idea herself, she certainly understands the importance of a brand of which she has become a part. Yet still, she brings with her the instincts of a reformer. Inside the factory, she introduces measures designed to improve workers' lives.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  She does a lot of Nellie Bly-esque good things. She establishes recreation rooms, turkeys at Christmas, a kind of social welfare attitude about her workers.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  But after a time, the company's finances grow unstable. Bly begins a relationship with a manager, but she's placed her trust in the wrong hands, and things begin to unravel.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  He's robbing her blind, and she puts a Brooklyn townhouse in his name. All kinds of stuff going on that is financially really messy. And it gets so bad that she is in jeopardy of prosecution.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  The same qualities that once made Bly formidable: her confidence, her appetite for risk, her belief that she could bend events to her will, now begin to work against her. She may have outmaneuvered editors, deceived doctors, and navigated foreign dangers, but business, it seems, is far less forgiving.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  By 1911, Ironclad collapses into bankruptcy.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  It is a sharp and public fall. She is indicted by a grand jury for forgery. And though the criminal charges are eventually dismissed, the long battle to clear her name and retrieve the funds leaves her almost destitute, with her reputation in ruins.

• 44:58Speaker 00

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• 45:28Speaker 01

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  A few years later, Bly leaves for Europe to stay with a friend, just as the continent edges towards the greatest conflict the world has ever seen.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  When the First World War begins, Bly finds herself stuck in Austria-Hungary. America is not yet involved, but borders are tightening, movement is restricted, and foreign visitors are viewed with growing suspicion.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  It's hard for her to leave, but she is well-placed to observe. And so she does what she has always done.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  So what can you do to bring in some money? What does she know how to do? Journalism. So she starts by doing this fantastic tour of the battlefield. She is the first woman on our side of the battle to cover Eastern Europe.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Bly begins filing dispatches to The New York Evening Post from the Eastern Front.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  A striking, determined woman in her 50s, she moves through devastated landscapes, observing soldiers, refugees, and the machinery of modern conflict.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  By this point, she's not the comely young lady with the wasp waist and the million-dollar smile. She may still have the million-dollar smile, but she's very portly now. So she's in her big fur coat, gallivanting around the battlefields and does some typical Nellie reporting. She's telling you about the dirty tablecloths and everything else. There's always her voice in everything she does.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  That voice remains her defining tool. Even in war, Bly does not focus only upon strategy or politics. She writes about the human cost: widows, orphans, the ordinary lives broken by forces far beyond their control. At one point, she is challenged by officials who suspect she is a spy and demand papers that she has left behind at the station. She is briefly arrested before being recognized by a doctor who then secures her release. "Being pocketless," she later writes of her inability to produce the correct papers, "is the greatest hardship a woman has to endure."

• 48:03Speaker 02

  She eventually returns to the United States. But by then, the world she comes back to has changed, and so has journalism. A new generation of women reporters is emerging. Bly now appears to some a figure from an earlier age: a pioneer overtaken by the world she helped to create.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  In the office of the journal, she comes in, this kind of portly figure that these young whippersnapper women of the 20s who are coming into journalism in droves now look at and go, "Oh, she was somebody sometime."

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Still, Bly continues to write. In 1919, she begins a column for The New York Journal, returning once more to social issues: injustice, inequality, and the people society prefers not to see.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  During this period, she loses her mother, who has been her closest confidant through thick and thin, and enters a lengthy dispute with her brother over her estate.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  And then, on January 27, 1922, Nellie Bly herself dies of pneumonia, aged 57.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  It is an unremarkable end for a life that had so often sought out risk and spectacle. No thrilling final assignment, no great moment of drama, just illness, followed swiftly by death.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  The next day, newspapers across America carry her name. One calls her "the best reporter in America."

• 49:37Speaker 02

  It is a bold claim, but if anyone was entitled to it, it was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, the girl once nicknamed "Pink" in a small Pennsylvania town, who had traveled further in every sense than almost anyone could have predicted.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  In the years since, Nellie Bly has been remembered for many things: a pioneer of daring investigative journalism, a practitioner of stunt reporting, a celebrity reporter, a businesswoman, and a war correspondent.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Journalism is ephemera. It is meant to disappear. No one is meant to have a legacy in journalism. It's fish paper the next day, as we know. The nature of the beast is it's not meant to last. So when someone could still have a legacy that we sustain till 2026 is something unbloody believable. It just is. That's the thing about her, I think.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  In an age when women were expected to stay quiet, Nellie Bly insisted on being heard and demanding the world listen. She didn't just report the news, she stepped into it, risking her own safety to expose injustice and prove that courage has no gender.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  From the halls of asylums to a race around the globe, Nellie Bly turned determination into action and action into change. Long after the headlines faded, her legacy remains, not just in what she uncovered, but in the doors she forced open for those who would follow.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of Salvador Dali.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  Dali's had a tremendously prolific resonance across popular culture. His posters are, of course, very common to find, or calendars and things in mass culture. A big part of what Dali was doing, which seemed very controversial at the time, of making money, of being a greedy artist, of putting his images on fashion design and commercials and putting his face on Al Kasselt's commercials or whatever it might be. Those are all things that an artist in his own time thought were just completely strange and not something a serious person would do. But I think now we have a much different view of what an artist is. I mean, an artist can be a personality, an artist can be much freer. And that kind of success isn't looked down upon today like perhaps it was before.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  That's next time.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www-noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

• 52:30Speaker 07

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• 53:01Speaker 01

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.