Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

Eliot Porter was a photographer who bridged nature photography and fine art. He was a master of capturing images in both black and white as well as color. For the latter, he became proficient at using the Dye Transfer Printing process to create brilliant, full color prints in the darkroom. His breadth of subject matter and technique provides us with a portfolio that we should all aspire to. Be sure to visit the Amon Carter Museum web site and view the gallery of his work, which is still covered by copyright.  GLB

“Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.”
— Eliot Porter

“There is no subject and background, every corner is alive.”
— Fairfield Porter, Painter and Critic

“You know Ken, color is not recognized — that’s my life mission, to create a body of work that will get it recognized, help put it on the same footing as black-and-white.”
— Eliot Porter, in a Conversation with Kenneth Parker

“A kind of revolution was under way, for with the publication of this supremely well-crafted book, conservation ceased to be a boring chapter on agriculture in fifth-grade textbooks, or the province of such as birdwatchers.”
— Reviewer of Porter’s Work

“Photography is a strong tool a propaganda device, and a weapon for the defense of the environment … and therefore for the fostering of a healthy human race and even very likely for its survival.”
— Eliot Porter

“You learn to see by practice. It’s just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can’t be photographed. You just have to keep doing it.”
— Eliot Porter

“Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors Nature should be viewed without distinction…. She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed–the uncomfortable half–while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.”
— Eliot Porter

“Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter’s work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: ‘There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,’ and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.”
— Rebecca Solnit

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation sites which did not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

Eliot Porter (1901–1990)

Eliot Porter was an American photographer best known for his color photographs of nature.

Photography Career

An amateur photographer since childhood, when he photographed the Great Spruce Head Island owned by his family, Porter earned degrees in chemical engineering and medicine, and worked as a biochemical researcher at Harvard University. Around 1930 he was introduced to Ansel Adams by a friend of the family and to Alfred Stieglitz by his brother Fairfield Porter. Stieglitz continued to critique Porter’s black and white work, now taken with a small Linhof view camera. In 1938, Stieglitz showed Porter’s work in his New York City gallery. The exhibit’s success prompted Porter to leave Harvard and pursue photography full-time. In the 1940s, he began working in color with Eastman Kodak’s new dye transfer process, a technique Porter would use his entire career.

The Getty Museum’s exhibition of Porter’s work, Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature, describes Porter’s contribution to photography as follows:

American photographer Eliot Porter was among the first to successfully bridge the gap between photography as a fine art and its roots in science and technology. Porter promoted the use of color photography from the 1940s until the mid-1970s, a time when most serious photographers worked in black and white. Porter’s work was widely published and used as a powerful visual argument for nature conservation. He explored new ways of presenting the natural world and his artistic and technical contributions to bird and landscape photography transformed these genres.

Porter’s reputation increased following the publication of his 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Published by the Sierra Club, the book featured Porter’s color nature studies of the New England woods and quotes by Henry David Thoreau. A best-seller, several editions of the book have been printed.

Porter traveled extensively to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. He published books of photographs from Glen Canyon (Utah), Maine, Baja California, Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. Cultural studies included Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and ancient Greek sites.

“As a child all living things were a source of delight to me … I still remember clearly some of the small things–objects of nature–I found outdoors. Tiny potato-like tubers that I dug out of the ground in the woods behind the house where I lived, orange and black spiders sitting on silken ladders in their webs, sticky hickory buds in the spring, and yellow filamentous witch hazel flowers blooming improbably in November are a few that I recall. I did not think of them as beautiful, I am sure, or as wondrous phenomena of nature, although this second reaction would come closest to the effect they produced on me. As children do, I took it all for granted, but I believe it is not an exaggeration to say, judging from the feeling of satisfaction they gave me when I rediscovered them each year, that I loved them.”
— Eliot Porter

James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) caused Porter to reexamine his work in the context of chaos theory. They collaborated on a project published in 1990 as Nature’s Chaos, which combined his photographs with a new essay by Gleick. Porter died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1990 and bequeathed his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum.

Eliot Porter’s brother, Fairfield, was a realist painter and art critic. His brother-in-law Michael W. Straus was the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation.

Biography of Eliot Porter

The Amon Carter Museum in Santa Fe, NM, was bequeathed the photo archives by Eliot Porter upon his death. On their web site, they present the following biography of Porter, which we reproduce here for your convenience. Please check out the full archive and gallery at the URL in the reference list below. Porter’s biography tells us:

Eliot Furness Porter was born in 1901 in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, the second of five children in an upper-middle-class family. His father, an amateur architect and natural history enthusiast, managed the family’s Chicago real estate and infused in his children a love of learning and the sciences. His mother, a Bryn Mawr graduate, shared her active support for liberal social causes. Given his first camera in 1911, Porter immediately challenged himself to photograph birds, first around his Winnetka home and then at the family’s summer retreat, Great Spruce Head Island, in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Sent East for high school, he followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1923 and a medical degree in 1929.

Initially, Porter took up a career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. But he could never quite let go of his love of photography. Spurred by support from his brother, the realist painter Fairfield Porter, and introductions in the mid-1930s to the acclaimed artist-photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he found himself increasingly photographing the northern New England landscape. In 1938 Stieglitz offered to exhibit some of these black-and-white photographs, along with several images that Porter made on an excursion to Austria, at his important New York City gallery, An American Place. That one-person show signaled Porter as a leading artist, on a par with such respected photographers as Paul Strand, Adams, and Stieglitz himself. It induced Porter to quit his medical career and take up photography full-time. But rather than continue to work in black and white, Porter almost immediately took up color to create more accurate photographs of birds. Soon he added other woodland subjects to his repertoire and became the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the colorful beauty and diversity of the natural world.

Over much of Porter’s career, black-and-white photography continued to set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant places the world over.

Building on the success of "In Wildness" and subsequent photographic celebrations of Glen Canyon (in Utah), Maine, and the Adirondacks, Porter moved increasingly farther afield to photograph and complete books heralding more distant and unusual sites. Such places included Baja California, Mexico, the Galápagos, East Africa, and Antarctica, all of which drew his attention because of their ecological diversity and the environmental stresses they faced. In the late 1960s, he added cultural topics to his agenda, eventually completing photographic studies of classical Greek sites, ruins of ancient Egypt, and modern China. All told, the artist published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990.

Porter never gave up his passion for birds, continuing to photograph them almost every spring until failing health in the 1980s prevented that often strenuous work. He always remained fascinated by the scientific and ecological underpinnings of his subjects, be they animal, plant, or mineral. In the 1950s he would at times set himself such tasks as photographing new-born spiders or the life cycle of a mosquito. Lichen was one of his favorite subjects; he sought it out wherever he traveled. The publication of James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) led him to review his life’s work in recognition of his own implicit illustration of Gleick’s influential theory.

But Porter’s fascination with nature’s workings and strong environmentalist ethic never superceded his passion for art. Throughout his life, he remained committed to making and exhibiting meticulously rendered dye transfer color prints of his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, when lines between art and natural history museums were more fluid, he was just as likely to show at the American Museum of Natural History as the Museum of Modern Art. Art museums’ gradual acceptance of color in the 1960s and 1970s led to a regular stream of monographic exhibitions at both large and small venues. Highlights include Intimate Landscapes (1980), the first one-person show of color photographs presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and major retrospectives sponsored by the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico (1973) and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1987 and 2002).

Married twice, Porter fathered five sons. In 1946 he established his permanent home in Tesuque, just outside of Santa Fe. It was there that he made his prints and assembled his books.

Dye Transfer Printing

Eliot porter was proficient in using the Dye Transfer Printing process to create brilliant color prints from his 4X5 view camera. The Amon Carter Museum includes the following description of his technique:

As its name implies, the dye transfer process literally involves transferring dyes (cyan, magenta, and yellow) in succession and in careful registration onto a sheet of gelatin-coated paper. Porter remained committed to the dye transfer process, both before and after the invention of simpler and more commonly used color papers, because it delivered richly colored prints and allowed him to control the exact hues and contrast of each final print.

1. Porter would initially shoot a scene generally on 4-by-5-inch inch transparency film, recording the exposure conditions on a card.
2. After developing the transparency, he would create three separation negatives by exposing the transparency three times onto three separate sheets of 4-by-5-inch black-and-white film. He would make the first exposure through a red filter, the second exposure through a green filter, and the third through a blue one.
3. He then would create three matrices by shining white light through each separation negative via enlargement onto its own sheet of matrix film. (Each matrix would hold an image the same size as the final print.) The resulting matrices are positive images that have a slight relief. The thicker parts print as darker areas. Generally he would sandwich the separation negatives with masks to further control contrast. These masks were softly focused versions of the darker information on the separation negatives.
4. To make a print, Porter would soak the red-filtered matrix in a bath of cyan dye, the green-filtered matrix in magenta dye, and the blue-filter matrix in yellow dye. Each matrix would soak up the dye according to its thickness, with the thicker areas picking up more color. He then would place one end of each dye-carrying matrix, in turn, onto register pins at the end of a special gelatin-coated paper and carefully roll it in contact with the paper. After about four minutes, when the dye had completely transferred to the paper, he would lift the matrix off, wash it, and register and roll the next matrix into place. The three dyes together would produce a full color print.
5. He could subtly change the hues and contrast of each print by changing the acidity of his dye baths and by resoaking and rerolling one or more of the matrices onto the receiving paper. He would record the various "recipes" used to achieve a good print in an ongoing printing notebook.
6. Once settling on a printing "recipe," Porter would write that recipe on a printing card for future reference, in case he had to make another print of that same image in the future.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Eliot Porter can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Porter

Also see…

Amon Carter Museum (Santa Fe, NM): Eliot Porter …
http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/porter/about.php

Getty Museum Exhibit: Eliot Porter_In the Realm of Nature…  
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/porter/

BNET: In Photography is the Preservation of the World_Eliot Porter
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_5_87/ai_90990383/

by Gerald Boerner

Bob Kahn was appointed by Robert Taylor to the technology office in DARPA where he was instrumental in the development of ARPANet. He went on to work with Vint Cerf in the development of the TCP/IP protocol stack that enables today’s Internet. He has received many awards for his historic contributions to networking and deserves a standing ovation for his many innovations to the area of networking. Thank you, Dr. Kahn!  GLB

“Strike the tent.”
— Bob Kahn

"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
— Bob Kahn

“New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.”
— Bob Kahn

“New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.”
— Bob Kahn

“You must be careful how you walk, and where you go, for there are those following you who will set their feet where yours are set.”
— Bob Kahn

“To be a good soldier, you must love the army. To be a good commander, you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love.”
— Bob Kahn

“Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.”
— Bob Kahn

“There is a terrible war coming, and these young men who have never seen war cannot wait for it to happen, but I tell you, I wish that I owned every slave in the South, for I would free them all to avoid this war.”
— Bob Kahn

Wizards of the Internet: Bob Kahn

Robert Elliot Kahn (Born: 1938) is an engineer who, along with Vinton G. Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the technologies used to transmit information on the Internet.

After receiving a B.E.E. degree from the City College of New York in 1960, Kahn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively.

In fall 1972, he demonstrated the ARPANET by connecting 20 different computers at the International Computer Communication Conference, "the watershed event that made people suddenly realize that packet switching was a real technology." He then moved moved to ARPA (now known as DARPA) and helped develop the TCP/IP protocols for connecting diverse computer networks. After he became Director of DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), he started the United States government’s billion dollar Strategic Computing Initiative, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the U.S. federal government.

After thirteen years with DARPA, he left to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in 1986, and as of 2009 is the Chairman, CEO and President. CNRI is a nonprofit organization which is intended to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure.

ARPANet

In its biography of Bob Kahn, the Living Internet related Kahn’s role with ARPANet, as:

In 1972, Kahn was hired by Lawrence Roberts at the IPTO to work on networking technologies, and in October he gave a demonstration of an ARPANET network connecting 40 different computers at the International Computer Communication Conference, making the network widely known for the first time to people from around the world.

At the IPTO, Kahn worked on an existing project to establish a satellite packet network, and initiated a project to establish a ground-based radio packet network. These experiences convinced him of the need for development of an open-architecture network model, where any network could communicate with any other independent of individual hardware and software configuration. Kahn therefore set four goals for the design of what would become the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP):

• Network connectivity. Any network could connect to another network through a gateway.

• Distribution. There would be no central network administration or control.

• Error recovery. Lost packets would be retransmitted.

• Black box design. No internal changes would have to be made to a network to connect it to other networks.

The Internet

While working on a satellite packet network project, he came up with the initial ideas for what later became the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which was intended as a replacement for an earlier network protocol, NCP, used in the ARPANET. While working on this, he played a major role in forming the basis of open-architecture networking, which would allow computers and networks all over the world to communicate with each other, regardless of what hardware or software the computers on each network used.

To reach this goal, TCP was designed to have the following features:

• Small sub-sections of the whole network would be able to talk to each other through a specialized computer that only forwarded packets (first called a gateway, and now called a router).

• No portion of the network would be the single point of failure, or would be able to control the whole network.

• Each piece of information sent through the network would be given a sequence number, to ensure that they were dealt with in the right order at the destination computer, and to detect the loss of any of them.

• A computer which sent information to another computer would know that it was successfully received when the destination computer sent back a special packet, called an acknowledgement (ACK), for that particular piece of information.

• If information sent from one computer to another was lost, the information would be retransmitted, after the loss was detected by a timeout, which would recognize that the expected acknowledgement had not been received.

• Each piece of information sent through the network would be accompanied by a checksum, calculated by the original sender, and checked by the ultimate receiver, to ensure that it was not damaged in any way en route.

Vint Cerf joined him on the project in the spring of 1973, and together they completed an early version of TCP. Later, it was separated into two separate layers, with the more basic functions being moved to the Internet Protocol (IP). The two together are usually referred together as TCP/IP, and are the basis for the modern Internet.

Recognition

He was awarded the SIGCOMM Award in 1993 for "for visionary technical contributions and leadership in the development of information systems technology", and shared the 2004 Turing Award with Vint Cerf, for "pioneering work on internetworking, including .. the Internet’s basic communications protocols .. and for inspired leadership in networking."

 Vint Cerf and Kahn being awarded the Presidential Medal Of
Freedom by Former President Bush

He is a recipient of the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award, the Marconi Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the President’s Award from ACM, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Award, the ASIS Special Award and the Public Service Award from the Computing Research Board. He has twice received the Secretary of Defense Civilian Service Award. He is a recipient of the 1997 National Medal of Technology, the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award, and the 2004 A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr. Kahn received the 2003 Digital ID World award for the Digital Object Architecture as a significant contribution (technology, policy or social) to the digital identity industry. In 2005 he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from the Alumni Association of the City College of New York, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the C & C Prize in Tokyo, Japan. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006. He was awarded the 2008 Japan Prize for his work in "Information Communication Theory and Technology" (together with Vinton Cerf).

• In 2001 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

• Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf were each inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) in May 2006.

Dr. Kahn has received honorary degrees from Princeton University, University of Pavia, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, George Mason University, the University of Central Florida and the University of Pisa, and an honorary fellowship from University College, London.

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

ARPANet can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

The Internet can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Bob Kahn can be found at…
http://www.daylife.com/topic/Bob_Kahn

Web Sites:

Bob Kahn: TCP/IP Co-Designer…
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_kahn.htm

Bob Kahn: Taking Stock and Looking Forward on YouTube…
http://www.daylife.com/topic/Bob_Kahn

Oral history interview with Robert E. Kahn at the Charles Babbage Institute…
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=119

by Gerald Boerner

Jules Verne’s Philias Fogg traveled around the World in the mid-1800s in eighty days. This book, when published, stirred the imaginations of the continent and north America. But in 1890, a journalist, Nellie Bly, in fact accomplished the feat of circumnavigating the earth in only 72 days, a full week less than that of the fictional Fogg. On her trip, she visited the great science fiction writer at his Amiens home and was wished “Good luck” on her voyage. This amazing feat was not Nellie’s only accomplishment; she wrote a headlines-grabbing exposé on the mental hospitals of the 19th century. She was a groundbreaker in the journalism world as a whole, and for women in particular.  GLB

“Good luck, Nellie Bly”
— Jules Verne

“Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.”
— Nellie Bly

“It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.”
— Nellie Bly

“I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly – a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God’s creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.”
— Nellie Bly

“I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it.”
— Nellie Bly

“I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God’s sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving.”
— Nellie Bly

“On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.”
— Nellie Bly

“Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning.”
— Nellie Bly

“All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one’s mind. After several months’ confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate.”
— Nellie Bly

“How can a doctor judge a woman’s sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.”
— Nellie Bly

“How can a doctor judge a woman’s sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.”
— Nellie Bly

Around the World in 72 Days: Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Jane Cochrane (1864 – 1922) was a pioneer woman journalist who wrote under the byline of Nellie Bly. She remains notable for two feats: a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Cochran’s Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, 40 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, she was nicknamed “Pink” for wearing that color as a child. Her father, a wealthy former associate justice, died when she was six. Her mother remarried three years later, but sued for divorce when Cochran was 14. Cochran testified in court against her allegedly drunken, violent stepfather. As a teenager she changed her surname to Cochrane, apparently adding the “e” for sophistication. She attended boarding school for one term, but dropped out because of a lack of funds. In 1880, Cochran and her family moved to Pittsburgh. A sexist column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor, who was so impressed with her earnestness and spirit he asked her to join the paper. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochran the editor chose “Nellie Bly”, a misspelling of the title character in the popular song “Nelly Bly” by Stephen Foster.

Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the women’s pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly’s report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Asylum Exposé

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a working-class boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged.

She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. “Positively demented,” said one, “I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her.” The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her “undoubtedly insane”. The case of the “pretty crazy girl” attracted media attention: “Who Is This Insane Girl?” asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the “mysterious waif” with the “wild, hunted look in her eyes”, and her desperate cry: “I can’t remember, I can’t remember.”

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions firsthand. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous inmates were tied together with ropes. The inmates were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow residents, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was. On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:

“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”

“…My teeth chattered and my limbs were …numb with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of ice-cold water…one in my eyes, nose and mouth.”

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The World’s behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury’s report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections.

Around the World

In 1888, Nellie suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. A year later, on November 14, 1889 she left New York on her 24,899-mile journey. A train was created for the leg from San Francisco to Chicago, the Miss Nellie Bly Special.

 Nellie Bly in her traveling clothes,
1890

“Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure” (January 25, 1890) Nellie arrived in New York. At the time this was a world record for circling the earth, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 72 days.

On her travels around the world, she went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), Hong Kong, the Straits Settlement of Penang and Singapore, and Japan.

Later years

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904 she invented and patented the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Her husband died that year. For a time she was one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but mismanagement forced her into bankruptcy. Forced back into reporting, she covered such events as the women’s suffrage convention in 1913, and stories on Europe’s Eastern Front during World War I.

 The grave of Nellie Bly
in Woodlawn Cemetery

In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Nellie look after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and difficult to place since he was half-Japanese. He spent the next six years in an orphanage run by the Church For All Nations in Manhattan.

As Nellie became ill towards the end of her life she requested her niece, Beatrice Brown, to look after the boy and several other babies in whom she had become interested. Her interest in orphanages may have been part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the day.

She died of pneumonia at St. Mark’s Hospital in New York City in 1922, at age 57, and was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1890…
  Nellie Bly completes her 72-day around-the-world trip.
• In 1915…
  Alexander Graham Bell makes a call from New York to San Francisco, inaugurating transcontinental telephone service.
• In 1937…
  The Guiding Light debuts on radio; it later moves to TV, becoming the longest-running drama ever broadcast.
• In 1959…
  American Airlines inaugurates transcontinental jet flights with the Boeing 707, the first successful commercial jet airliner.
• In 1961…
  President John F. Kennedy holds the first live televised presidental news conference.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Nellie Bly can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly