Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  A telegraph message could be sent from London to Bombay, more than four thousand miles away, and a reply received, astonishingly, in less than five minutes. The feat was unlike anything ever seen before, and was performed, in innumerable variations, untold times each day. The distinguished English historian A. W. Kinglake called the telegraph “that new and dangerous magic.” Like the best magicians, it produced extraordinary effects by means that few people understood, and indeed, it seemed to have performed the greatest trick of all: making time disappear. Awestruck observers struggled to express the new conditions of the world the telegraph had wrought. “Time itself is telegraphed out of existence,” declared the London newspaper called, fittingly enough, the Daily Telegraph. “They have killed their father Time,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in a poem entitled “The Deep-Sea Cables.” Another poem, “The Victory,” written in tribute to Samuel Morse, had it that “Science proclaimed, from shore to shore / That Time and Space ruled man no more.” At a banquet held at Delmonico’s in New York Morse was toasted for having “annihilated both space and time in the transmission of intelligence.” The railroad had regulated time; the telegraph seemed to have vanquished it entirely.

  DECEMBER 18, 1889

  Hong Kong

  Elizabeth Bisland was scheduled to leave Hong Kong on December 21, on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship Prussian, a five-masted single-screw ship notable for having made the fastest time on record between Hong Kong and Ceylon. The Prussian would carry Bisland all the way to Genoa, Italy, where it was due on January 23. An arrival on that date would have been too late to get her to New York by January 28, seventy-five days after her departure, but the German government had begun offering financial inducements to its steamship lines to arrive ahead of schedule; as a consequence, noted the San Francisco Examiner, “it has been their pleasing custom of late to arrive in Genoa seven or eight days ahead of schedule time, which would make it very delightful for Miss Bisland.” And just to be doubly sure, The Cosmopolitan sent a cable to the owners of the Norddeutscher Lloyd company offering a substantial reward (the specific amount was never revealed) if the Prussian was able to surpass its fastest travel time. Given the incentives to do so, it seems very likely that the Prussian would have arrived in Genoa no later than January 17, at which point Bisland could have taken a train to Le Havre, where the fast French Line steamship La Champagne was departing on January 18. A typical Atlantic crossing would then have brought Elizabeth Bisland to New York on January 26, resulting in a trip around the world, depending on the exact hour of arrival, of less than seventy-three days.

  In Hong Kong, though, Elizabeth Bisland met with unexpected misfortune: as it was entering Hong Kong harbor, the Prussian broke its screw.

  The loss of a ship’s screw—the bladed propeller—was a very common accident of the time (it could be caused, for example, by hitting a piece of floating timber, or a sunken wreck, or a sheet of ice, or a whale), but it was also a very serious one. A contemporary account of steamship travel warned that losing the screw will “render a single screw steamship helpless, and she can only reach port by being towed, or by the very tedious process of sailing under her own canvas.” To repair or replace the screw was a major job, and inevitably meant a substantial delay. When she received the distressing news about the Prussian, Bisland hurried from her friends’ house to the local offices of the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company (owners of the Oceanic, on which she had made such good time across the Pacific), where officials advised her that the Thames, of the Peninsular and Oriental line, would soon be departing for Colombo, in Ceylon. At Colombo she could transfer to the Britannia, which was—like the Victoria, on which Nellie Bly was then en route from Brindisi to Colombo—one of the large modern ships of the P&O fleet. The Thames, admittedly, was not as fast as the Prussian; moreover, it was a British mail ship, the schedules of which were as regular as the rising of the sun, and just as impervious to financial inducements. However, the Thames was leaving Hong Kong three days earlier than the Prussian would have, which meant that, barring any more unforeseen developments, Bisland had every chance of meeting La Champagne in Havre and arriving in New York ahead of Nellie Bly. (About the transfer to the Thames, Bisland herself said only, “I am advised to go in her as far as Ceylon, and I do.”) She wired the news back to The Cosmopolitan: there had been a change of plans; she would be taking the Thames to Colombo, and connect there with the Britannia for Le Havre.

  So on Wednesday morning, December 18, Elizabeth Bisland found herself on the deck of the Peninsular and Oriental steamship Thames with her friends from Hong Kong. The Union Jack flew gaily from the masthead above them. The population of the ship seemed to her as delightfully motley as that of the city she was leaving. As with the other Peninsular and Oriental ships, the crew of the Thames was made up mostly of the East Asian sailors called Lascars, distinctive in their blue checked cotton tunics and red turbans. A group of Parsees in their fine clothes and purple hats were bidding farewell to a friend headed home to India. A member of the Highlander Regiment was also on his way home to Scotland, and several of his fellow soldiers were seeing him off, bearing whisky and bagpipes. A few took up the pipes and played him a last tune; the others linked arms and danced, their faces turning red and sweaty in the heat. Soon the ship’s bell had rung, and members of the crew circulated on deck giving the usual warning: “All ashore that’s going!” Bisland’s friends wished her speed on her journey; she called goodbye to them as they made their way down the gangplank. She wondered when she would see again the beautiful city of Hong Kong; she regretted having to leave, just as she had Yokohama before it. Her next stop, five days and sixteen hundred miles hence, would be Singapore. The rope was cast off, and the Thames made its way out of the bay; Hong Kong slowly vanished in a haze of sunlight. The keening of the bagpipes, lively and mournful, still sounded in her ears.

  ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, ON AN INSIDE PAGE JUST below an item from Reading, Pennsylvania, about a three-month-old girl who had tragically been suffocated by the family cat (the cat, the story reported, had been found lying across the girl’s mouth and nose), The World printed a small advertisement announcing the “Nellie Bly Guessing Match,” to commence the following Sunday. DON’T FAIL TO ORDER YOUR SUNDAY WORLD AT ONCE, the ad instructed readers, AND FILL OUT A BLANK THEREIN WITH A GUESS AS TO THE TIME OF NELLIE BLY’S TOUR. THE BEST GUESSER WILL HAVE A FREE TRIP TO EUROPE.

  The next day’s edition included a full article, headlined A GUESS THAT WILL PAY. It began: “Thousands of ‘mind’s eyes’ are now following Nellie Bly in her trip around the world. Interest in her race has been increased by THE WORLD’S offer to furnish a first-class trip to Europe, with about a week each in the English and French capitals, and perhaps a run down to historic Rome, all free of cost, to the person who sends to THE WORLD on SUNDAY WORLD blanks the nearest guess to the exact time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds that are required for her globe-girdling tour.” Anyone could participate in the guessing match, but there was one important stipulation: all guesses had to be recorded on the official coupons (“blanks,” in The World’s parlance) that would be printed in Sunday editions of the paper. Only one guess would be permitted per coupon. “Those who wish to guess more than once,” The World advised readers, “must equip themselves with a number of the Sunday World blanks.” (And the only way so to equip oneself, it didn’t need to be stated, was to buy multiple copies of The World.)

  The first coupon for the Nellie Bly Guessing Match appeared in the issue for Sunday, December 1, 1889. It measured about five inches high by two inches wide and featured a drawing of a dark-haired young woman standing amid the clouds, wrapping what looks to be a ribbon of some sort—perhaps it is a measuring tape—around the circumference of the globe. Below were separate boxes for days, hours, minutes, and seconds, as well as lines for the guesser’s name and address and for the date on which the guess had been made. Once the coupon was filled out, readers were instructed, it should be
clipped and sent to The World care of the European Trip Editor. At the bottom of the coupon was a capitalized, bold-faced exhortation: GUESS EARLY AND OFTEN!

  The accompanying article, entitled “Hints for the Guessers,” asked the question that was seemingly on everyone’s mind: “When will Nellie Bly actually arrive in New York?” Bly’s officially recorded moment of departure from Hoboken, The World reminded its readers, was 9:40:30 A.M. on November 14, 1889. As of the first of December her exact whereabouts were unknown, but she was somewhere on the Red Sea, on a steamship sailing eastward toward Ceylon, where she would connect with another steamship bound for Hong Kong. If Bly was able to get to Hong Kong by December 25 to meet the steamship Oceanic, and if the Oceanic crossed the Pacific Ocean smoothly and delivered Bly to San Francisco on time, she would then depart for New York on January 22 by way of the Central Pacific, Union Pacific, and Pennsylvania Railroads; and if she did not encounter any broken bridges, snow blockades, or derailments Bly would arrive at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Jersey City depot sometime around seven P.M. on January 27, 1890. If she did manage to maintain that schedule the entire way (“the ‘if,’ ” The World felt obliged to point out, “is a big one”) and arrived on the dot of seven o’clock, the trip would have been completed in precisely 74 days, 9 hours, 19 minutes, and 30 seconds. Those were the basic facts of the journey, but as to the final result, any of the paper’s readers knew as much as any of its editors. “Therefore let the guessing proceed,” The World declared, “always bearing in mind that all guesses must be made on the accompanying blank.”

  A World entry blank for the Nellie Bly Guessing Match (Illustration Credit 11.1)

  “THE GUESSING MATCH has begun in beautiful earnest,” The World reported on Tuesday.

  The envelopes containing coupons for the Nellie Bly Guessing Match had started to arrive at the World offices first thing Monday morning, most of them white or buff-colored, with some of pink or light blue, each bearing one of the newly issued red two-cent stamps that featured the heroic profile of George Washington, or perhaps two of the blue Benjamin Franklin one-cent stamps; some of the envelopes, though, had been affixed with extra postage, for they contained several of The World’s coupons, some with as many as twenty, and with accompanying notes from the guessers indicating that they intended to submit just as many coupons the following week, and the week after that, and every week thereafter until the contest was brought to a close. In New York at that time business mail was delivered as many as four times a day, and with each successive delivery the piles grew higher, quickly exceeding the limits of the European Trip Editor’s office and seeping ever farther into the hallway, the incoming mail like an avalanche, or a tide that never receded. The guesses were arriving in far greater numbers than even the most optimistic editor could have anticipated; in the face of those colossal numbers, remarked a World writer, “it seemed that arithmetic itself must give out and topple over.” A kind of lottery fever seemed to have descended on New York, thanks to the unexpected possibility of winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for an initial investment of only a few cents; and what made the prospect especially appealing was the fact that this particular lottery, unlike all others in the city of New York, was perfectly legal. “The match will be the biggest thing that New York has ever seen,” The World gleefully predicted, noting that copies of the Sunday World with unmarked Nellie Bly coupons still in them “are now as eagerly sought as those attached to United States bonds.”

  By the end of that first day The World had received more than one hundred thousand guesses.

  “THE GUESSERS,” The World observed on Wednesday, “adopt queer methods sometimes.” Several hundred of them apparently considered 7 to be a lucky number, and had based their estimates on it: thus 77 days, 7 hours, 7 minutes, and 7 seconds, or some variation on the theme. One entrant pointed out that in his guess the numbers of days, hours, minutes, and seconds were each divisible by 7, and the sum of the numbers added together was itself divisible by 7. A guesser from Brooklyn ascribed his use of the mystic 7 to the 7 letters found in the name “Nell Bly.” “This, however, is not the young lady’s full name,” The World admonished, “so the application of it in this way is imperfect.”

  A reader from Troy, New York, explained in a letter that accompanied her coupon that she was sure to win the European trip, as she had obtained the figures in a dream, after a lobster salad supper, lying flat on her back with her hands clasped over her head, and that she “never knew such cause and results to fail me.” Another entrant, a woman identified in the paper only as L. N., sent in twenty guesses, and with them four verses of poetry, the final one of which read:

  Oh, ma chère Nellie Bly,

  You are smart, and you are spry;

  Pray, oh, do pray try

  And get here just as nigh

  Time marked for you to go by.

  This was the first example of what would become, for a while, a minor poetic genre: the Nellie Bly around-the-world poem. At least one of the poems sent to The World included the poet’s guess within it:

  Nellie Bly is flying high

  On the China Sea;

  With her goes the hope of one

  Who wants to see Paree;

  She’ll get here in 74,

  Sure as she’s alive,

  Hours 12, minutes 10 and seconds 25.

  A guesser from Wilmington, Delaware, created an astonishingly beautiful entry—“really,” The World observed admiringly, “a work of art.” Across the top of the page a steamship and a railroad train had been painted in watercolors, and below, the days, hours, minutes, and seconds were printed in Roman numerals. There was, however, a serious problem: the guess had not been submitted on an official World coupon—thus disqualifying it from consideration—and furthermore, after going to all of that trouble the sender had forgotten to include his or her own name.

  A reader in Chicago submitted her guess with a twelve-page letter in which she explained that she had arrived at her decision with the assistance of a clairvoyant who was possessed by the spirit of Marco Polo. The spirit of the dead traveler, she wrote, had revealed that he was accompanying Nellie Bly around the world, and, with the aid of Aristotle, Cicero, and Pythagoras, had figured out that the journey would be completed in one hundred days, ten hours, ten minutes, and ten seconds.

  Each day another deluge of guesses descended on the office. “Such great success never before visited a project so suddenly,” The World exulted on Thursday. “By to-morrow night, if the downpour continues at the present rate, the European Trip Editor will be covered so deep that it will take a snow-plough and a big force of men to find him in the midst of his work.” The times of the guesses ranged from sixty to one hundred days; according to The World, one entrant had predicted that the trip would never be completed. “I sincerely hope that this guess will not win,” he wrote, “but, knowing the uncertainty of life, I think the chance worth taking.” As was to be expected, most of the guesses tended to cluster around Nellie Bly’s estimated time of arrival, though The World took pains to point out that Bly’s actual time could easily vary up to five days in either direction. As sixty different guesses were possible for each minute (one for each second), there could be up to 3,600 different guesses to an hour, 86,400 different guesses to a day, and 864,000 different guesses to ten days. And that was simply within the range of easy possibility; beyond those dates the number of guesses—any one of which might turn out to be correct—was practically limitless, especially given the fact that it was permissible within the rules of the contest to divide the seconds themselves into fractions.

  The rules of the contest were in fact a subject of ongoing clarification and refinement. In the event of a tie, The World declared, the prize would be awarded to the guess that had been mailed first. The winner could embark on the trip at any point during the 1890 travel season. The right to the trip could be transferred by the winner to someone else if circumstances so compelled it, and there might be some allo
wances made to travel to European capitals other than London, Paris, and Rome. On the other hand, The World emphatically refused one reader’s suggestion that the winner might instead choose a trip of equal value to California, or perhaps even accept the equivalent in money and simply stay home: “The successful guesser will be awarded a free round trip to Europe—nothing else—and THE WORLD feels assured that the winner of the prize will be so proud of the victory won over so many thousands of other guessers that he or she, as the case may be, will not elect to stay at home, or to dispose of his right, but will set sail triumphantly and see the three most interesting capitals of the Old World.”

  On Sunday, December 8, at the end of the first week of the Nellie Bly Guessing Match, The World reported that the week’s total circulation was 2,637,560 copies, an increase of more than three hundred thousand over the previous week. An editorial observed, “It is safe to say that no newspaper in this country ever printed so many copies in one week in the month of December as did THE WORLD last week.” Two days later, on Tuesday, December 10, The World abandoned its initial plan to provide coupons only in its Sunday editions, and now—in response, it said, to “numerous requests”—began to include them in each day’s issue, as it would until the close of the contest. (Exactly when that would be had not yet been determined.) The around-the-world race had long since grown into the leading topic of conversation in town, discussed in horse-cars and on ferries, in factories and the exchanges; it was a subject ready-made for spirited debate, as everyone could support his or her opinion about the outcome of the race with additional opinions about the weather, the state of modern technology, and the constitution of the female traveler. The thousands of New Yorkers who had submitted a guess now had not just a rooting interest but a personal stake in Nellie Bly’s trip (the contest of Bly against the calendar had, at least for the contest’s entrants, rendered Elizabeth Bisland mainly an afterthought), and they watched her progress around the globe with all the excitement and anxiety of a gambler at a horse race or prizefight; but unlike spectators at a race course, they did not have to cease betting once the race had begun. Indeed, it was now possible to enter new guesses every day rather than have to wait for the end of the week, guesses that might be more optimistic or pessimistic depending on the latest reports or simply on one’s mood at the time, and each new coupon could be had for only two cents, three on Sunday, and submitted for just the price of a stamp.