Nellie Bly won a bet between men who didn’t exist. Bly, a 25-year-old journalist, made her professional reputation feigning insanity to study a mental institution. The “men” were members of the Reform Club of London. Over a game of whist, one bet the other 20 thousand pounds he could circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. So began Jules Verne’s bestselling 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days.

Bly, employed by the New York World newspaper, began her own journey on November 14, 1889, departing by steamship from Hoboken, New Jersey. Travels took her through England, France, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Japan. To sustain her, Bly brought one 16-by-7-inch suitcase and some £200 cash (American newspapers having tighter budgets than British gentlemen’s clubs).

The facts were these: 25,000 miles is the circumference of the earth; 1,920 is the number of hours in 80 days. To beat the fictional Fogg, Bly would have to average just over 13 miles per hour for more than two months. She did. January 25, 1890—“seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure”—the young female journalist arrived by transcontinental railroad in New York a world celebrity.

Nellie Bly’s success spoke to a world suddenly obsessed with speed and the new-found mechanical ability to transcend time and space as never before. A fad in pocket watches—in Germany, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, sales reached 12 million for a population of 52 million—led ordinary citizens to discuss their days in ever-smaller increments: “five-minute interviews, minute-long telephone conversations, and five-second exchanges on bicycles,” wrote Karl Lamprecht.

The bicycle, first fitted with pneumatic tires in 1890, was four times faster than walking. While early automobiles, at least in England, faced fines if exceeding 4 miles per hour on public roads, by 1906 the land-speed record was set at 125 miles per hour. Simultaneously, passenger steamers competed for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, reaching upwards of 25 knots—approximately 29 miles per hour—before the sinking of the Titanic brought mass condemnation for the “mania for speed and smashing records.” Still, of course, engineering advancements continued.

In 1902, European and Asian officials met to discuss a planned railroad journey from Paris to Peking. Afterward they announced, bettering by half Jules Verne’s hero, they had “resolved the problem of traveling around the world in forty days.” Five years later, a popular German travel guide cited a new piece of jargon: the term “globetrotter.”

The first circumnavigation by air took U.S. Army airplanes thirty-five days in 1924. On March 3, 2005, American adventurer Steve Fossett made the trip in 67 hours. Space shuttles, meanwhile, can repeat the feat every 90 minutes.

As in the case of the Titanic, however, tragedy has attended some airborne record pursuers. The most famous attempt to travel around the world, Amelia Earhart’s 1937 transoceanic solo flight, ended in her disappearance and presumed death.

On a daily basis, the greatest change new developments in circumnavigation have brought humanity are not in taking people far from home but in delivering distant goods—be they ripe bananas or the latest laptop. World trade, far more than world travel, depends on otherwise-minor differences in speed to make a profit. While passenger airliner service ceased five years ago on Concorde supersonic transport craft, for example, last year the $130-million-plus Port of Prince Rupert opened in British Columbia, Canada on the promise shippers would save 68 hours sailing there from Shanghai than to Los Angeles.

Still, speed for its own sake has its fans, and wagerers should know better than to bet against Nelly Bly’s successors. When, earlier this year, Danica Patrick made headlines as the first-ever female formula racecar champion, one could say Bly had all but predicted the victory a century earlier. “Oh, I don’t know,” she had said, responding to a reporter’s comments that her record-breaking travel time was, given her gender, ‘remarkable.’ “It’s not so very much for a woman to do who has the pluck, energy and independence, which characterize many women in this day of push and get-there.” wt