On November 14th, 1889, a newspaper reporter named Nellie Bly (a pen name; she was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran) set out from New York City on a quest to beat the record of Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg, who traveled around the world in 80 days in Verne’s 1872 adventure novel, Around the World in 80 Days.
Initially, her superiors at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World didn’t want to let Bly go. “It is impossible for you to do it,” the managing editor told her. “In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes…no one but a man can do this.”
“Very well,” Bly replied. “Start the man and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.” They didn’t doubt that, and eventually they relented.
Bly boarded the Augusta Victoria with nothing but the clothes on her back—a dress and overcoat (made specially of sturdy material for the occasion)—and a single handbag.
“One never knows the capacity of an ordinary hand-satchel until dire necessity compels the exercise of all one’s ingenuity to reduce every thing to the smallest possible compass,” she wrote.
In mine I was able to pack 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 ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter.
Bly’s goal was to make the trip in 75 days; she completed it in 72, arriving back in Jersey City to great fanfare (and lots of newspaper sales for the World) on January 25, 1890. She also beat out a competitor—another female journalist named Elizabeth Bisland who had been attempting the same feat (in the opposite direction) for Cosmopolitan.
Fun fact: after arriving in Paris, Bly took the time to travel to Amiens to see Jules Verne. "If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands," he told her. Considering she beat even that estimate by a week, one can only hope he found a third hand to applaud with.
