Search Engine Pioneer Google has hosted a doodle on American Investigative Journalist Nellie Bly’s 151th Birthday. Many people are left wondering who is she. However we think that the doodle and its timing are equally important. Here we explain why.
Nellie Bly on the Homepage of Google
1. Nellie Bly was a pioneer in the field of investigative journalism and civil rights. At the time when women were restricted to topics like family, gardening, household, Nellie broke the traditions and wrote hard pressing stories on the poor and oppressed.
2. Apart from being a Journalist, she also was an industrialist, inventor, and charity worker. She received US patent 697,553 for a novel milk can and US patent 703,711 for a stacking garbage can.
3. She was a reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days. Inspired by Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s novel, “Around the World in 80 Days,†Nellie set sail from New York in November 1889 determined to beat Fogg’s time. Traveling by steamships and sailboats, she sent dispatches back to her newspaper as she circled the globe. Instead of sitting idly and just observing, she was always a part of the action and conversation, despite the fact that public spaces were typically reserved for men at the time. Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York.
4. The video part of the google doodle has been created with the help of Karen O’s lyrics and the imaginary paper cuttings of newspapers featuring articles on her, which makes it a unique doodle of its kind.
5. This year a short film based on her life would be released in United States. The film would be accompanied by a movie adaptation of her book 10 Days in a Madhouse. The film star Caroline Barry as Bly. She wrote this book in 1887 after going undercover at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and exposed the living conditions there.