Nellie Bly!

I'm not big on quoting lines from movies, but one that I've always remembered is from Rocky: "She's got gaps, I've got gaps, together we fill gaps."

We all have gaps, and one kind of gap we can have is in our knowledge, no matter how much we know. Here's an example of a knowledge gap of mine that I recently recognized: Nellie Bly.

I knew her name and had a vague sense of when she lived (turn of the century), but that was about it. Something to do with airplanes or traveling? I think I associated her with Amelia Earhart, though I knew that wasn't correct.

Why did I never learn about this innovator in investigative journalism? A woman who started her career well before the 20th century while she was still a girl, who wouldn't take no for an answer? I didn't even know that "Nellie Bly" was a pen name for Elizabeth Cochrane.

Her best-known works, going undercover in New York's insane asylum for women and being the first person to go around the world (in 72 days), get most of the attention, but she also:

[interviewed] Emma Goldman and socialist politician and labor organizer Eugene V. Debs [and] covered major stories like the march of Jacob Coxey’s Army on Washington, D.C. and the Pullman strike in Chicago, both of which were 1894 protests in favor of workers’ rights.

She interrupted her journalism career at age 30 by marrying a septuagenarian millionaire who owned a steel container company. She patented a milk can, and may have been part of designing the 55-gallon oil drum still used today. After her husband died and finding that running the company was not her forté (it went bankrupt), she returned to journalism, where she covered women's suffrage and World War I. 

Nellie Bly died of pneumonia in 1922 at age 57, and is buried in the Bronx.

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This write-up about her life goes into more detail.