Nellie Bly, The Journalist That Beat Phileas Fogg's Journey Around The World
Updated: 3 days ago
Two years after she'd talked her way into a New York asylum to expose it from the inside, Nellie Bly pitched her editors an even stranger idea: send her around the world and see if she could beat the fictional 80 day journey from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, a novel published 16 years earlier that had captured the public's imagination for a planet suddenly stitched together by steamships and railways. What she didn't know when she left Hoboken on 14 November 1889 was that a rival newspaper was about to send a second woman in the opposite direction, and that she wouldn't find out about it until she was already most of the way around the globe.
Quick answers
Did Nellie Bly know she was racing anyone when she left? No. She set out purely to beat the fictional 80 day journey from Jules Verne's novel. She only learned that Cosmopolitan had sent Elizabeth Bisland around the world in the opposite direction when she reached Hong Kong on Christmas Day, over five weeks into the trip.
Who actually won the race, technically speaking? Bly, decisively. She completed the circumnavigation in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, arriving back in New Jersey four and a half days ahead of Bisland, who still beat Verne's fictional 80 day benchmark with a time of a little over 76 days.
Did Bly really travel using only ordinary scheduled transport, like she promised? Not entirely. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World chartered a private tugboat to get her ashore in California ahead of other passengers and arranged a dedicated express train with priority over all other rail traffic for her final leg home, neither of which was available to an ordinary passenger.
What happened to Nellie Bly after the race? She kept reporting for a few more years, then largely left journalism after marrying a much older industrialist and running his manufacturing company for over a decade. She returned to newspaper work later in life, including covering the Eastern Front during the First World War.
"Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper"
The idea had been kicking around Bly's head for a year before her editors agreed to it, and even then they nearly gave the assignment to a man instead. When Bly pushed back, she reportedly told her editor plainly that if he sent a man, she'd walk across to a rival paper and start the same trip the same day, purely to beat him. That settled it. She packed one bag, wore the same sturdy travelling dress for the entire trip and boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria bound for England, planning to circle the globe using nothing but regularly scheduled trains and ships available to any ordinary traveller.
Tea with Jules Verne
Eight days in, Bly made a detour that could have sunk the entire attempt before it properly began. Arriving in Southampton, she took a train to Amiens, France, to meet Jules Verne himself, the man whose novel had inspired the whole trip. Verne and his wife met her at the station at 4pm, and despite Bly speaking almost no French and Madame Verne almost no English, the two women got on immediately. Over tea in the Vernes' drawing room, with a white Angora cat wandering the furniture, Verne showed her his study and the manuscript he was working on, a novel about shifting the Earth's axis that would later be published as Topsy Turvy.
Studying a map of her planned route against Phileas Fogg's fictional one, Verne told her he wasn't sure she could beat his book's timeline, though he admitted "each day gained will be a triumph," and added, with a novelist's eye for a good subplot, that she might "save a young widower" somewhere along the way. The stopover risked costing her most of a week she didn't have to spare. She made her connecting train to Calais with barely any room to spare.
The rival she didn't know about
What Bly hadn't been told, and what her own paper hadn't planned for, was that a rival women's magazine had decided to send its own reporter around the world in the opposite direction the same week. Elizabeth Bisland was a 28 year old literary editor at Cosmopolitan, born to a Louisiana plantation family and better known in New York for hosting a literary salon than for undercover reporting. She wasn't remotely keen on the idea when her publisher proposed it, reportedly citing dinner guests and having nothing suitable packed, and her real objection seems to have been a simple dislike of the fame it would bring. She went anyway, departing by train for San Francisco the same day Bly sailed, and travelling west across the Pacific while Bly went east.
Bly found out she had a competitor at all only in Hong Kong, on Christmas Day, when a steamship office clerk casually mentioned that "the other woman" was ahead of schedule and going to win. Up to that point, as far as she knew, her only opponent had been a Frenchman's imagination.
Monkeys, storms and a very convenient tugboat
Bly's route ran through Egypt and the Suez Canal, then Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, picking up a pet monkey she named McGinty somewhere along the Asian leg of the trip largely on a whim. Bisland's route home was in some ways the more interesting one on paper: after crossing the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, she stopped at Aden, in what's now Yemen, to see the ancient stone reservoirs known as the Tanks, then came back into the Atlantic world through France, England, Wales and Ireland before the final crossing to New York. On paper it reads like the better trip. In practice, it went badly. Crossing the Atlantic on the return leg, Bisland's ship ran into winter storms that slowed her down badly, and by her own account she was redirected onto a slower vessel than she'd have chosen.
Whether that redirection was simple bad luck or a rival publisher's fingerprints on the schedule is something historians still argue about, and Bly's own side of the race wasn't exactly played straight either. Despite her public promise to use only ordinary scheduled transport, Joseph Pulitzer's paper chartered a private tug, the Millen Griffith, to rush her ashore in California ahead of other passengers, and arranged for a dedicated locomotive, nicknamed the Nellie Bly Special, to carry her home with the right of way over all other rail traffic.
That train covered around 2,577 miles from San Francisco to New Jersey in roughly 69 hours. One stretch of track from the Southern Pacific line covered 815 miles in 25 hours, and a 67 mile section on the Santa Fe line was run in 98 minutes flat, engine crews swapping over in under a minute so the train barely had to slow down. Bly rode part of the way in the locomotive cab itself, picking up an impromptu lesson in how to drive it.
72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds
She arrived back in New Jersey on 25 January 1890 to a crowd estimated at around 15,000 people, having circled the globe in exactly 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, beating both Phileas Fogg's fictional 80 days and, more importantly to readers following the story in real time, Elizabeth Bisland. Bisland herself arrived back in New York four and a half days later, having completed the same circumnavigation in a little over 76 days, which would have comfortably beaten Verne's fictional record too had she been racing him alone rather than racing Bly.
The two women's afterlives split in opposite directions almost as sharply as their routes had. Bly came home to lecture invitations, a syndicated column and lasting fame as the woman who beat Phileas Fogg. Bisland wanted almost none of it, publishing her own measured travel account, In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World, turning down the lecture circuit and eventually moving quietly to Great Britain for a year specifically to get away from the attention.
A board game, and a betting pool
Pulitzer's paper hadn't just chartered trains and tugboats. While Bly was still travelling, the World ran a public contest inviting readers to guess her exact finishing time, with an all expenses paid trip to Europe as the prize, which kept the paper's circulation climbing every day a new dispatch came in by telegraph. By 1890, the toy company McLoughlin Brothers had turned the whole spectacle into a board game called Round the World with Nellie Bly, sending players along her real route and making them wait out the same delays she'd faced along the way, right down to sitting idle waiting for a ship to depart.
What happened to her after
Bly didn't stay a globe-trotting celebrity for long. Within a few years she'd largely stepped back from reporting altogether after marrying Robert Seaman, a businessman more than forty years her senior, and taking over as president of his Iron Clad Manufacturing Company when he died in 1904. She ran it for over a decade, introduced her own reforms to wages and working conditions and eventually held 25 patents in her own name, including an improved steel barrel design that's still basically the template for the 55 gallon drum used today. Accounts differ on exactly what sank the business afterwards, either heavy debt or a cashier's department that turned out to be forging checks, but either way it ended in bankruptcy. Bly went back to journalism in her later years and talked her way into the war zone between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in 1914, becoming one of the first foreign correspondents to reach it and getting briefly arrested as a suspected British spy for her trouble.
It's a strange kind of afterlife for a piece of journalism, half genuine feat of endurance and half publicity stunt engineered by a newspaper that had already learned exactly how far readers would follow a good story, having sent the same reporter into an asylum for ten days just two years earlier. Bly wasn't the last person to try to beat a fictional or record time either. Nearly a century later, Elspeth Beard rode a motorcycle solo around the world, and in 1908, a group of racers attempted something even more reckless: driving from New York to Paris in the dead of winter, using cars that were barely up to the job.
