On this day in 1890, newspaper reporter Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) completed her Around the World in 72 Days journey and became an international celebrity. She was 25 years old.
In those days Harvard scholars were telling women that too much education atrophied the uterus which would lead to the extinction of the species!
Women like Nellie Bly never listened.
On January 25, 1890, the world waited for a young reporter named Nellie Bly to arrive back home. For 72 days, as she jumped cargo ships, trains, tugboats, and rickshaws, newspaper readers had been following her progress in one of the most highly publicized journeys of all time. Never before had anyone -- man or woman -- circled the globe with such speed, outdoing the "record" of eighty days set by Jules Verne's popular fictional character, the legendary Phileas T. Fogg. The journey would make her famous.
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