 "Google doodle marks journalist Nellie Bly's 151th birthday")
Google on Tuesday dedicated its musical doodle to pioneering American journalist Nellie Bly's 151th birthday.
Born on May 5, 1864, in United States, she was originally named Elizabeth Jane Cochrane and was known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days.
In 1880, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published an article titled "What Girls Are Good For.” In dismissive terms, the column’s author wrote that women shouldn't be allowed to work because their place was at home.
It was a scathing “letter to the editor” to protest this misogynistic article that launched her remarkable career. Impressed by the missive’s prose, the editor offered her a job at the paper — where Cochrane began to use the pen name Nellie Bly.
“At that time women who worked at newspapers almost always wrote articles on gardening, fashion or society. Nellie Bly eschewed these topics for hard pressing stories on the poor and oppressed,” the biography on her official website says.
She authored Around The World In Seventy-Two Days, based on an expedition she took that covered many countries including England, France, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
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She was also America’s first woman war correspondent and covered World War I from Austria.
In addition to being a journalist she was also an industrialist, inventor, writer and charity worker and was known for launching a new kind of investigative journalism, especially to investigate reports of harsh treatment meted out to women at mental asylums.
Bly was 57 when she died in 1922.