Nellie Bly (1867–1922) is a journalist and social activist in the late 19th century working for Joseph Pulitzer at the New York World. Her given name is Elizabeth Cochrane, and she adopted the pen name Nellie Bly after the song of the same name by Stephen Foster. In Martian Dreams (1895), Nellie Bly volunteered to assist in Nikola Tesla's 1895 mission to Mars to attempt to rescue the ill-fated passengers of Percival Lowell's unintended voyage to the red planet in 1893.