WHOA, Nellie Bly! And Happy Birthday to both of us...

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 5th. For a good chunk of her life, Elizabeth was a writer/journalist, under the pen name Nellie Bly. 

In those days there were many women writers, but most of them "hid" their real personas under a false name.

Nellie and I have two things in common - our birthdays, our passion for writing, and of course journalism.

So it should be no surprise that on the eve of our birthdays, I'm writing about someone that I would definitely have hung around with a lot. 

After a stint at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Nellie fled to New York, where editors would not hire her because she was a woman. Now that's not news. But Nellie had what in those days people would have called gumption. 

Broke and desperate, she somehow wrangled her way into the New York World offices and talked her way into a job. The assignment - pretend to be insane and get herself into the Women's Lunatic Asylum on what is now called Roosevelt Island. Reports of brutality and neglect were rampant, and she was to shine a light on the stories. 

Nellie Bly, Age 26

After ten days she had her expose, and the New York World got her released from the asylum and published her story: Ten Days in a Mad-House. 

But that wasn't enough. She talked her editor into letting her turn Jules Vernes' fictional tale Around the World in Eighty Days into a reality.

Nellie traveled around the world in 72 days - carrying nothing but a small bag of clothing, toiletries, and some cash. She made the trip on steamships, railroads, and a leg on the White Star Line's HMS Oceanic.

Nellie, 31, married a 73-year-old millionaire named Robert Seaman. She got into manufacturing, invented a few things, and ultimately lost a bunch when her company went bankrupt. But it didn't take long before she dusted herself off and went back to her first love, reporting. She covered war and got arrested when mistaken for a British spy.

Bly also covered the suffragist movement. In one of her stories for the New York Evening Journal, she correctly predicted that women would get the vote by 1920. 

She was only 57 when she died, but man, she had lived. She's in the National Women's Hall of Fame and the New York Press Club hands out a yearly Nellie Bly Cub Reporter Award. 

One of her best quotes - "I was too impatient to work at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers."

Damn right, Nellie, you were damn right.