Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864-1922), an American journalist who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days and for her undercover work to report on a mental institution from within. A pioneer in her field, she launched a new kind of investigative journalism, and was also a writer, inventor and industrialist. She entered on her career in journalism when a letter she wrote to the Pittsburgh Dispatch caught the editor's eye and he soon offered her a regular column to be written under the name of Nellie Bly. Her early work included a series of investigative articles on women factory workers but when the paper received complaints from factory owners she was reassigned to the women's pages to cover topics like fashion and society with which she soon became disenchanted. In 1885, aged only 21, she travelled to Mexico to serve as foreign correspondent, spending half a year reporting on the lives and customs of the people, and her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico (1888). In 1887 she left the Pittsburgh Dispatch and headed for New York where she took on an undercover assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, agreeing to feign insanity in order to gain entry into the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island and investigate reports of brutality and neglect. The results of her investigation first appeared as a series of articles which later the same year were published in book form bringing her critical acclaim and also leading to a grand jury investigation which brought about an increase in budget for the Dept of Public Charities and Corrections.