Nellie Bly’s whole life was worth celebrating, but this story will work well enough. A pioneering female journalist who later became a leading industrialist, 25-year-old Elizabeth Cochrane (Bly was her pen name) decided to add world traveler to her resume 125 years ago. Specifically, she wanted to turn Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” into reality, while writing about it for the New York World. On November 14, 1889, she set out to do just that, boarding a steamer across the Atlantic for a journey that would take her nearly 25,000 miles. She used steamboats and railroads to traverse Europe and Asia, as well as two oceans. In France, she met the inspiration for her journey, Jules Verne himself. She visited a leper colony in China, bought a monkey in Singapore, and made it back to New York 72 days after she left, setting a new world record.

That record wouldn’t last long, but it was only one part of Bly’s legacy. She also exposed horrific conditions at a New York insane asylum by faking mental illness in 1887 to see how patients were treated firsthand. In later life, she married a millionaire manufacturer and took over the presidency of his manufacturing company. Besides being a captainess of industry, she was an inventor in her own right, patenting unique milk can and garbage can designs. (It’s been claimed she invented the 55-gallon oil drum, but this isn’t confirmed.)

She eventually went bankrupt thanks to embezzlement by her employees, and went back to journalism for a time, where she gave favorable coverage to the emerging women’s suffrage movement. Before she died in 1922 of pneumonia, she predicted right on the nose that it would be 1920 before women won the vote. Her life would have been remarkable for any person, but is even more so for a woman spanning the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I got up and dressed myself today, which felt pretty impressive until I read about her. Maybe I’ll circle the globe or invent a few things after lunch?

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