Nellie Bly:

Nellie Bly was "the best reporter in America," wrote the New York Evening Journal on the occasion of her death in 1922. One of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nellie Bly was a pioneer of investigative journalism. She feigned insanity and got herself committed to a lunatic asylum to expose its horrid conditions. She circled the globe faster than any live or fictional soul. She designed, manufactured, and marketed the first successful steel barrel produced in the United States. She owned and operated her factories as a model of social welfare…