BIO: Pioneering woman journalist Elizabeth Jane COCHRANE ("Nellie Bly") was born in Cochrane's Mill, PA in the 1860s to the town's namesake and most prominent citizen, Michael COCHRANE, a wealthy landowner, judge and businessman. Mr. Cochrane had had ten children by his first wife, was widowed, and then fathered five by more by his second wife the third of which was Elizabeth. Apparently he put his second family in jeopardy by not having a will at the time of his death. Elizabeth began her journalism career at the age of 18 at the "Pittsburgh Dispatch." Taking her pen name "Nellie Bly" from a Stephen FOSTER song about a social reformer, she quickly gained a reputation for writing about needed social reforms. Her feature articles were on such subjects as divorce, slum life and the injustice of poverty. "Bly" later moved to New York and took a job with Joseph PULITZER's "New York World," winning national fame for investigative writing when she feigned insanity to get into an asylum on NYC's Blackwell's Island, and her subsequent expose' again brought about reform. Elizabeth's determined reporting brought to the public's eye corruption, revealing shady lobbyists and the way in which women prisoners were being treated by police. "Nellie Bly" made international headlines when in 1890 she made a round-the-world trip in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, beating the "record" of Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg in "Around the World in Eighty Days." At the age of 30 "Bly" married Robert SEAMAN, a 70-year-old industrialist, attempted to run his business after died, later returning to journalism where she helped to find homes for abandoned children.