Around the world in 80 days?
Do you think that some ordinary newspaper women that writes about cooking could make it around the world in eighty days? Well she did! Here is her story: On November 14, 1889, newspaperwoman Nellie Bly dawned on a planet-circling race to beat Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in Eighty Days written by Phileas Fogg. It was the culminating sensation of an already amazing journalistic career. Almost never remembered is that Bly had competition: Elizabeth Bisland, who was working for a rival New York newspaper. This all started because in 1888, Nellie suggested to her editor at the New York World that she could take a trip around the world. Bly mapped out her route, but purchased a ticket only for the first leg of her journey so that she could adjust her travel schedule at any time. The journey in all was 24, 889 miles. “I only remember my trip across the continent as one maze of happy greetings, happy wishes, congratulating telegrams, fruit, flowers, loud cheers, wild hurrays, rapid hand-shaking and a beautiful car filled with fragrant flowers attached to a swift engine that was tearing like mad through flower-dotted valley and over snow-tipped mountain, on–on–on!” she wrote. On Bly’s travels around the world, she went through England, France (she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo Hong Kong, the Straits Settlement of Penang and Singapore, and Japan. It was to be the fastest-ever journey around the globe. All over the newspapers it stated that two you woman are flying around the world and that Nellie Bly is now “putting a girdle” on the world. In addition that she struggles for recognition and that this shall do the trick. In Nellie Bly’s journey she packed two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh fabric and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep her face from chapping in the different weather temperatures she would come upon. On January 25, 1890, police cleared a path through a cheering crowd for reporter Nellie Bly as she stepped off a train in New York just 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds after setting sail east to prove she could circle the globe in less than 80 days and she was right.
This is a photo of the route that Nellie Bly took.
