I am low-key obsessed with Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days". Here are three amazing facts about it:

1. The crux of the story is a bet that the protagonist would circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Verne published it in a newspaper (old-timey Substack, for those who are unfamiliar) in a serialized manner. The last chapter of the book was published on December 21st, the main deadline of the bet in the book. Which is why many people actually believed it was a true story and held their own bets. Some transport companies even offered Jules Verne money to mention them in the story. Product placement was real even then!

2. Jules Verne's book was published in 1873. The events of the book take place in 1872, exactly a year earlier. And in 1869 two important things happened: the Suez Canal was opened, and the first transcontinental railroad in America was completed, making the book's events possible. Verne was really writing hot on the trail! And the main theme of the book, therefore, is not British punctuality but technical progress.

3. The first person to actually do what is described in the book (in 1889) was a journalist, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She actually made the trip slightly faster, and under a pseudonym, Nellie Bly, she published a book called "Around the World in Seventy-Two Days". She was generally an exceptional woman--she also did a famous exposé after spending ten days undercover in a mental asylum. In later life she also was an inventor.

One more thought about the book and our world. Since the book was published, there had never been a moment, with all the wars and all the terror of the XX century, where such a trip became impossible. Magellan, in 1519, took almost three years and died in the process. Nellie Bly did it in 72 days. The modern record is something like 32 hours. Progress does not stop and does not go back, whether we want it or not.

If you like this note, I might expand it into a proper post later.