Elizabeth Jane (Cochran) Seaman

Nellie Bly, Journalist, Dies of Pneumonia By THE NEW YORK TIMES Mrs. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, known to thousands of people throughout the world as Nellie Bly, her nom de plume, died yesterday morning of pneumonia at the age of 57 in St. Mark's Hospital, to which she was removed a few days ago from her rooms in the Hotel McAlpin. Services will be held at 2 o'clock tomorrow afternoon at the Church of the Ascension, Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. Friends may view the body today at the funeral parlors of Herbert H. Baxter, 597 Lexington Avenue. Born at Cochrane's Mills, Pa., a town founded by her father, Judge Cochrane, Elizabeth Cochrane found herself penniless when still in her teens and began her journalistic career writing for a Pittsburgh paper at $5 a week. Later she reached a high water mark of $25,000 earned with her pen in one year. She went down into the sea in a diving bell and up in the air in a balloon and lived in an insane asylum as a patient; but the feat that made her famous was her trip around the world in 1889. She was sent by The World to beat the mark of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's hero of "Around the World in Eighty Days," and she succeeded, making the tour in 72 days 6 hours 11 minutes. Every one who read newspapers followed her progress and she landed in New York a national character. In 1895, she married Robert L. Seaman, forty years her senior, President of the American Steel Barrel Company and the Ironclad Manufacturing Company. They lived happily together at 15 West Thirty-Seventh Street, and on Mr. Seaman's death in 1910 she took entire charge of the properties. Luck turned against her, however, and a series of forgeries by her employees, disputes of various sorts, bankruptcy and a mass of vexations and costly litigations swallowed up Nellie Bly's fortune. Her courage and liveliness remained, however, and she returned to journalism with all her old spirit. At the time of her death she was a member of the staff of The New York Evening Journal.