Seventy-Two Days Around the World

At 9:40 AM on November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria at Hoboken, New Jersey, to circle the globe. She was twenty-five, a reporter for Pulitzer's New York World, and aimed to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional eighty-day record. She carried one bag, one dress, a sturdy overcoat, and a few changes of underwear. She wrote her will before departure.

Bly traveled east through England, then detoured to Amiens to meet Jules Verne. He drew her route on a wall map next to Fogg's fictional path. "If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands," he told her. From France she crossed to Italy, through the Suez Canal, to Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, filing dispatches whenever she reached a telegraph. The World published every update. The public followed obsessively.

She arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890: 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, 14 seconds. Cannons fired. Crowds cheered. She had beaten Fogg without a fictional manservant or unlimited funds. Pulitzer turned it into a merchandising bonanza -- board games, trading cards, songs. Bly became the most famous journalist in America.

Her trip proved the world had shrunk. What Verne imagined as extraordinary in 1873 was, by 1889, a logistics problem. Bly solved it with planning, nerve, and a newspaper willing to bet on a woman traveling alone. She didn't just go around the world. She proved it was small enough to go around.

round the world with nellie bly — the 1890 board game published by the new york world to follow her journey. source: wikimedia commons