As Nellie Bly tells the story, it was on a Sunday in the fall of 1888 that the idea came to her. Feeling restless, she had the urge to go elsewhere and travel the globe like the fictional Phileas ...
The girl who would later take on the pen name Nellie Bly and help launch a new kind of investigative journalism was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864 in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania.