When the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad made it possible to circle the globe in months — Phileas Fogg’s eighty days in Jules Verne’s novel, and the reporter Nellie Bly who took up the challenge and went round in seventy-two
Alphonse de Neuville · Public domain · Source
Lines built from east and west met at Promontory Summit, Utah, linking the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the United States by rail.
The Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea opened, greatly shortening the sea route from Europe to Asia.
Jules Verne’s novel, in which the London gentleman Phileas Fogg wagers he can circle the globe in eighty days, appeared in a newspaper — a story of the years when the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad had just opened.
The American journalist Nellie Bly, out to beat the fictional Fogg, travelled alone eastward around the world and returned in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes — the fastest circuit yet.
French novelist whose adventure stories such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days made him a father of science fiction
16th US president (1861–1865) who preserved the Union in the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation; assassinated just after the war ended
French diplomat and entrepreneur who won the concession for the Suez Canal from Egypt and opened it in 1869
American journalist famed for her undercover exposé of an insane asylum, who travelled alone around the world in 72 days in 1889–90