Nellie Bly, 100 Years -- January 27, 2022

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Pioneering investigative journalist Nellie Bly died 100 years ago today, on 22-January-1922.

NELLIE BLY DIES

OF PNEUMONIA

IN N.Y. HOSPITAL

Widely Known Writer

Remembered for Record-Breaking

Trip Around the World.

NEW YORK. Jan 27 -- Nellie Bly, in private life Mrs. Robert L. Seaman, one of the special writers on the staff of the Evening Journal, died today of pneumonia In St. Mark's Hospital.

She became ill two weeks ago and shortly afterward was taken to the hospital from her room In the Hotel McAlpin. She sank steadily and yesterday no further hope was held out for her recovery.

Nellie Bly occupied a unique place in the world's journalism for nearly two-score years, and the reputation she made in the eighties by her record-breaking trip around the world for a New York newspaper remains undimmed today.

Men and women in all corners of the United States knew her as a great ministering angel to humanity. Her dally mall contained many grateful letters from persons who had been helped by her words of advice, inspiration, and wisdom.

Nellie Bly knew life as few newspaper writers of the day. The background of her knowledge of human fraillties, sacrifices, joys, was the extraordinary newspaper life she had led since she began writing in Pittsburgh about forty years ago. She had always been a feature writer and had appeared on the public platform many times in behalf of good movements to which she decided to give her energetic support.

She waged a sensational fight against gambling and more recently wielded her powerful pen in an agitation against capital punishment. She heard the cry of homeless boys, the blind, and the destitute; and her forceful articles in their behalf brought about many much-needed reforms.

Nellie Bly covered political conventions for many years and her articles were tremendously popular. She knew the political game as few women writers of today.

Nellie Bly was fifty-six years old and had led a tremendously active life. She was a newspaper writer, from her early youth, managed two large corporations for a time, and in her after life returned to newspaper work with as great an avidity as she had shown in her younger days.

The thing that made her famous was her trip around the globe in 1889 in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes.

She undertook the trip to prove that Jules Verne's famous romance, "Around the World In Eighty Days," could be matched in reality.