On November 14, 1889, journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochran) began a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days.
She completed the trip with eight days to spare and soon wrote the book, “Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.”
“Nellie Bly was an American journalist known for her investigative and undercover reporting. She earned acclaim in 1887 for her exposé on the conditions of asylum patients at Blackwell’s Island in New York City, and achieved further fame after the New York World sent her on a trip around the world in 1889.
….she traveled around the world in an attempt to break the faux record of Phileas Fogg, the fictional title character of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, who, as the title denotes and the story goes, sails around the globe in 80 days. Given the green light to try the feat by the New York World, Bly embarked on her journey from New York in November 1889, traveling first by ship but later also via horse, rickshaw, sampan, burro and other vehicles. She completed the trip in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds — setting a real world record, despite her fictional inspiration for the undertaking.”
— “Nellie Bly”
Biography.com
2002 U.S. stamp, Poynter.org Image
“In the famous novel Around The World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, an Englishman, Phileas Fogg, sets off to circle the world in the fastest time possible and for the sole purpose of winning a gentleman’s wager.
In others of his books, Jules Verne specialized in amazing developments of science and technology still to come. He forecast the invention of airplanes, the submarine, even rockets to the moon. But in Around the World in 80 Days he wrote only of what, theoretically, was already possible when the book appeared, in 1873, the heyday of such nineteenth century wonders as the Suez Canal and the new transcontinental railroad across America. The world had become a great deal smaller, and this Verne dramatized as no one ever had.
Yet it was not until 1889 that anyone dared try what Phileas Fogg had done and the lone adventurer who did was neither a gentleman nor ficticious, but an intrepid young American woman who was determined to make the journey even faster and with a lot more than a bet riding on the outcome.
She was Nellie Bly and she stands now in history as one of the earliest of a long line of women who distinguished themselves in what had been the all-male world of journalism and thereby brought increasing interest and vitality to the pages of American newspapers.”
— David McCullough Introduction
PBS American Experience, “Around the World in 72 Days”
The PBS American Experience program also reminds us about “The Nellie Bly Song.”
“In her first few articles for the Pittsburgh ‘Dispatch,’ Elizabeth Jane Cochran’s byline read ‘Orphan Girl.’ The name worked well for these articles, but the paper’s editor, after adding her to his staff, decided that she needed a name that was ‘neat and catchy.’ The men in the newsroom made suggestions and the name ‘Nelly Bly’ was proffered. The name had been made famous by one of Pittsburgh’s favorite sons, the great songwriter Stephen Foster. In his haste, though, Madden spelled the Nelly of the song as ‘Nellie.'”
And here is the song that changed Elizabeth Cochran into Nellie Bly:
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