In 1888, Elizabeth Seaman, a journalist with the New York World better known by her pen name Nelly Bly, suggested to her editor that she attempt to travel solo around the world, turning Jules Verne’s famous novel Around the World in Eighty Days from fiction to fact. Her editor consented and a year later, Bly, known as a hard-hitting investigative reporter who had written exposes on, among other things, the terrible conditions in a New York mental hospital by posing as a patient, hit the road. She traveled by steamship and railroad through, among other countries, England, France, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and China. While in France she actually met up with Jules Verne. She arrived back in New Jersey 72 days later, achieving a (albeit temporary) world record.
