Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Cochran took the pen name Nellie Bly after writing an angry letter to a Pittsburgh paper that had published a column on why girls were a burden. In 1887, working for the New York World, she feigned insanity well enough to be committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island, and stayed ten days. What she found was not madness but cold, spoiled food, beatings, and women locked away who were merely poor, foreign, or inconvenient — several of them, she concluded, entirely sane. Her report forced a grand jury investigation and a large increase in the city's budget for the insane.

Two years later she went around the world to test the seventy-two days of Jules Verne's novel, and did it in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes, filing dispatches as she went. She later married a millionaire manufacturer, ran his company, patented improvements to the steel barrel and provided her workers with health care and gymnasiums before folding under embezzlement by her own staff. She returned to reporting, covered the Eastern Front in the First World War and the suffrage parades, and died of pneumonia at fifty-seven. Her grave went unmarked for over fifty years.