Did anyone really travel around the world in eighty days?

Yes, and faster: in 1889–90 the journalist Nellie Bly went around the world in just over 72 days. Jules Verne's 1872 novel Around the World in Eighty Days imagined Phileas Fogg of London betting half his fortune, £20,000, that he could circle the globe in 80 days after a newspaper article claimed a new Indian railway line made it possible. Verne wrote the book during a rough patch in his own life, conscripted as a coastguard during the Franco-Prussian War short of money, and grieving his father, who had recently died. In the novel, Fogg wins his bet thanks to a clever twist: travelling constantly eastward, his party gains a full day by crossing longitudes, experiencing 80 sunrises while the people back in London only counted 79.

Seventeen years later, Nellie Bly, a journalist at the New York World, decided to turn Fogg's fiction into fact. In 1888, she pitched her editor on an around-the-world trip to turn the novel into fact for the first time; he doubted she could manage it, arguing she only spoke English, would pack too much as a woman, and would need a male escort. Bly got her chance anyway, and on 14 November 1889, with just two days' notice, she boarded a steamer and set off on a journey of nearly 25,000 miles. Her newspaper kept readers hooked by running a contest where readers guessed her exact arrival time down to the second.

Bly's route took her through England, France, where she stopped to meet Jules Verne himself in Amiens, the Suez Canal, Ceylon, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, almost entirely travelling alone. She arrived back in New York on 25 January 1890, having circled the globe in just over 72 days, beating Fogg's fictional record by more than a week. She wasn't even the only woman trying: Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore was making the same trip in the opposite direction for the Cosmopolitan. Bly's record didn't last long either; within months, another traveller, George Francis Train, pushed the real-world time down to 67 days.