Nellie Bly Races Around the World
A 25-year-old reporter carrying almost no luggage boarded a steamer determined to turn a novelist’s fictional record into a real one, and to beat it.
At 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, New York World reporter Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria in Hoboken, New Jersey. Carrying one small bag, she set out alone to do what no real traveler had: circle the globe faster than the 80 days Jules Verne had imagined for his fictional hero Phileas Fogg.
Bly’s dispatches, printed in the World as she crossed oceans and continents, turned a newspaper stunt into proof that a young woman could travel the world alone, on a strict deadline, and succeed. The same hunger for globe-spanning real-life drama would later put stories like Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb on front pages worldwide.
Verne had written Fogg’s 80-day circuit in 1872 as something close to fantasy. Seventeen years of faster steamships and connected railroads quietly made the fictional number beatable. History keeps repeating that compression: eighty-two years later, almost to the week, Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, trading days for years as the unit of record-breaking travel.
People Behind the Story
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, she was already famous for a 1887 undercover assignment in which she feigned insanity to get committed to the Blackwell’s Island asylum, exposing the abuse of patients there. Two years later she turned that same boldness toward beating a novel’s fictional record.
Key Moments
Bly gets herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island under a false name. Her resulting exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, helps push the city’s asylum budget from $1.5 million to $2.34 million.
Bly departs Hoboken aboard the Augusta Victoria, beginning her race against Verne’s fictional 80 days. The same day, Cosmopolitan magazine sends rival writer Elizabeth Bisland around the world in the opposite direction, though Bly does not learn of the competing trip until she reaches Hong Kong.
During a brief stop in Amiens, France, Bly meets Jules Verne himself, the novelist whose fictional record she is chasing.
Bly reaches San Francisco aboard the steamer Oceanic, then boards a chartered train nicknamed the “Miss Nellie Bly Special” for the final dash east.
Bly arrives back in New Jersey after 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes, a new world record and 8 days faster than Verne’s fictional Fogg.
Adventurer George Francis Train breaks Bly’s new record with a 67-day trip of his own.
Did you know? Two years before she raced around the world, Bly spent ten days undercover inside a New York asylum, feigning insanity to expose how the city treated patients with no one to advocate for them. The same instinct to shrink the distance between a story and its audience still drives projects like NASA’s Voyager 1, now reporting back from more than a light-day away.
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