Tired of reporting on soft topics in the theater and arts just because she was a woman, Elizabeth Cochrane, who went by the pen name Nellie Bly, quit her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 and moved to New York City. Six months of knocking on the doors of newspaper editors finally paid off when she wrangled a meeting with John Cockerill, managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

Perhaps Cockerill was just trying to get rid of her. Whatever the case, he asked Bly if she might get herself committed to Blackwell's Island, an insane asylum, to write an insider’s account of the treatment of the patients. Did she have the courage for this? Could she fake being insane well enough to fool the doctors and live there a week without getting caught? She said she could.

"How will you get me out," she asked, "after I once get in?"

"I do not know," he replied, but he assured her he would.

With that Bly returned home to practice loony expressions in front of a mirror. The next day, without telling any family or friends, she checked into a boarding house and began her act. She refused to go to bed that night, and told other boarders she was fearful of them.

The next morning they called the police, who took her to court, where before a judge she pretended to not remember anything.

Several doctors examined her. "Positively demented," one said, considering her “a hopeless case.” A doctor at Bellevue Hospital diagnosed her as "undoubtedly insane." Meanwhile her attempts to fly under the radar were not entirely successful. The "pretty crazy girl" was attracting the attention of other newspapers: "Who Is This Insane Girl?" the New York Sun asked. The New York Times called Bly the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes," noting her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."

Bly got her wish and was committed to the asylum.

There she was able to experience the deplorable conditions that its patients endured. The place was filthy, infested with rats and garbage. The food was virtually inedible, consisting of watery soup, rotten meat, stale, dried out bread, and dirty water.

“There were no knives or forks, and the patients looked fairly savage as they took the tough beef in their fingers and pulled in opposition to their teeth,” Bly later wrote.

A piece of bread was the final entree but butter was never served at dinner nor was coffee or tea. “I saw many of the sick ones turn away in disgust. I was getting very weak from the want of food and tried to eat a slice of bread. After the first few bites hunger asserted itself, and I was able to eat all but the crusts of the one slice.”

Some of the patients, Bly discovered, were as sane as she was, sentenced to the asylum unjustly. Patients that nurses believed posed a threat were tied together with ropes. Patients endured forced baths, doused with with buckets of ice water. The nurses were abusive, ordering patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not.

Even worse was how the patients were forced to spend their waking hours, backs straight, sitting on hard wooden benches.

Bly wrote:

Ten days after Bly was admitted to the asylum, The World got her released. The resulting report, which Bly later published as a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, was a smash hit, and made her a star. It also led to a grand jury investigation into the conditions at Blackwell's Island. The grand jury ultimately recommended changes that Bly proposed, including an increased budget for care of the insane and a call for future examinations to be more thorough so only the seriously ill would be sent to the asylum.

Bly went on to write other sensational stories, shedding light on some of New York City’s darkest, most desperate corners. She posed as a poor clinic patient, visited a home for “unfortunate women,” and joined the ranks of female factory workers in “The Girls Who Make Boxes.” She went to seven different doctors and received seven different diagnoses and an “extraordinary variety” of prescription medications. During a heatwave she stayed in one of New York’s poorest tenements for two days.

In another stunt Bly even purchased an infant on the black market. “I bought a baby last week, to learn how baby slaves are bought and sold in the city of New York. Think of it! An immortal soul bartered for $10. Fathers-mothers-ministers-missionaries, I bought an immortal soul last week for $10!”

Two years later Bly set out to best the time of the fictional character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Her plan: to travel around the earth by car, train, and ship, sending short dispatches by telegraph and longer reports by the post. Leaving the same day was another female journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, of the rival Cosmopolitan, whose publisher had caught wind of Bly’s publicity stunt.

The two women filed stories during their respective journeys. The World, to sustain interest, started a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match." Readers could estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize being a trip to Europe with spending money. Enroute she visited a leper colony in China and purchased a monkey in Singapore. She ran into many delays along the way, mostly due to rough weather. Bly didn’t even know she was in a race until she hit Hong Kong, when she was told that Bisland had passed through three days earlier.

Illustrations from Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Nevertheless, Bly arrived in San Francisco behind schedule but ahead of Bisland, and to be sure she would win her publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, chartered a private train to bring her home. She made it to New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m. while Bisland was still four and a half days away, still crossing the Atlantic. And Bly claimed the world record to even greater acclaim. Her time: 72 days. The distance traveled: 24,899 miles.

But it was her undercover reporting inside the insane asylum that has stood the test of time etched Nellie’s Bly’s name into the history books.