Nellie Bly, America's first investigative journalist got her start in an asylum

"In 1885 the Pittsburgh Dispatch published an article entitled 'What Girls Are Good For,' which claimed a working woman was 'a monstrosity.' The feature provoked a fiery rebuke from a 21-year-old reader, Elizabeth Jane Cochran, whose argument so impressed the editor that he published an advertisement asking the author to come forward so he could meet her.

She did, and he hired her on the spot, her first article appearing under the name “Orphan Girl.” Soon after, she changed her pen name to the title of a popular song by Pittsburgh songwriter Stephen Foster, and so 'Nellie Bly' was born—a name forever associated with her pioneering role in investigative journalism.

In the course of her life, she spotlighted social ills and corruption, often at great personal risk, resulting in important reforms. Distinguishing herself in the almost exclusively male world of late 19th-century journalism, she broke new ground for women in the field."

"In fall 1889, as the World opened new headquarters, Pulitzer wanted a big, attention-grabbing story. Bly proposed an around-the-world race to break the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Pulitzer thought the idea better suited to a man. 'Very well,' Bly said, 'Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.' Pulitzer wisely reconsidered.

Bly set off from Hoboken, New Jersey, on November 14, 1889. Among her many adventures was a meeting with Jules Verne in France. Verne, age 61, told her: 'If you do it in 79 days, I shall applaud with both hands.' She would win his applause handily, completing the trip in a record-breaking 72 days. When she stepped off the train in Jersey City, thousands cheered her. At 25, she was America’s first celebrity journalist."