Had she lived during the time of Galileo Galilee, she would have been consigned to an inconceivable limbo of anguish, not just for being a woman, but for successfully traveling around the world. But unlike Galileo's interests in the planets, she was concerned with human life.

Her indefatigable life marked by sheer wit and courage, Elizabeth Cochrane changed investigative journalism and we must therefore mark her 140th birthday. Cochrane, popularly known by her pen name, Nellie Bly, was born in 1864 in Pennsylvania to Michael and Mary Jane Cochrane. She avidly read in her father's library before joining a boarding school in Indiana. Poor health forced her to return home and tragedy awaited her with the death of her father when she was merely six. In 1885, she read in the Pittsburgh Dispatch a sexist editorial by Erasmus Wilson titled "What are girls good for?"

Disturbed by the disgraceful content of the article, Bly strongly responded and signed her response "lonely orphan girl." Her response was not sprightly written, but the profundity of its content forced the Dispatch's editor, George Madden, to request her to re-write her contribution.

Exhibiting a wondrous level of understanding that human society is doomed to perpetual disharmony and crises if it continued to marginalize part of its members, Bly re-wrote the article. The Dispatch commissioned her to make more contributions. She took it upon herself to contribute to humanity by exposing demeaning conditions facing the poor and the wretched.

Her investigations involved daring adventures out of which she wrote stories that shocked the world. She worked in a Pittsburgh factory, not for any material gain but to investigate horrifying working conditions, insulting wages and child labor. Her mission was so widespread and unnerving that many institutions threatened to stop buying advertising spaces in the Dispatch. The editor stopped what had become known as the Bly Series.

Bly joined the Joseph Pulitzer's NY World in 1887.While writing for the NY World, she even feigned insanity to get into the New York insane asylum.

Can the modern media measure up to Cochrane's success?

After regaining "sanity" she left the asylum and revealed shocking and traumatic experiences that patients were going through. They were being beaten, fed on vermin-infested food and subjected both to torture and punishments that were not requisite for rehabilitation. A grand jury was formed to investigate and reforms were put in place.

Bly surprised the world when she circled the world in 72 days, putting to shame Phileas Fogg, the character in Jules Verne's romance, Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly retired from journalism in 1895. She however found herself back in the media, reporting for the New York Evening Journal, during the World War I.

Almost forgotten by the world, Bly died of pneumonia in New York in 1922. She lived a rich life, occupied by noble thoughts, and took the trouble to get the right information even when it meant being on the war lines.