In late 1889 reporter Nellie Bly set out to beat the record of Phineas Fogg, a fictional character in Jules Verne’s popular book Around the World in Eighty Days.
Her day-by-day account of her adventures was featured on the front page of the New York World.
When she won her race, bettering Fogg’s time by almost eight days, there was a huge celebration.
Nellie Bly (whose real name was Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman) did much more than this publicity stunt. As a young reporter, she pretended to be insane and described the horrors she saw when she was sent to a woman’s insane asylum.
She also went undercover to expose conditions in a sweatshop and a woman’s prison.