Around the World Many Times

1873 1st Vernes book

 In 1872, French author Jules Verne published "Around the World in Eighty Days," creating the memorable character Fhileas Fogg, an Englishman who makes a wager that he can go around the world in 80 days, with his French valet Passepartout.  The book has inspired many adaptations, among them the 1965 movie starring David Niven as Fogg, the Disney movie with Steve Coogan as Fogg, and the current Masterpiece serial, with David Tennant, among many other versions.

Jules Verne

However, the inspiration for Verne's book may not have come from simply his imagination.  An Italian traveler named Ciovanni Francesco Gemell Careri wrote a book in 1699 titled "Voyage Around the World."   In 1871 the Union Pacific Railroad Company published a description of routes, times, and distances describing a trip around the globe in 77 days and 21 hours.  In 1869 the periodical 'Le Tour du monde' published a short piece titled "Around the World in Eighty Days," but even that referenced the Nouvelles Annales written by Conrad Malte-Brun, who died in 1826, and his son, who died in 1889.

Verne's book has challenged many people to pick up the gauntlet.  In 1928, a 15-year-old boy, sponsored

by a Danish newspaper, made his own race, which was published in a book titled "A Boy Scout Around the World.  A sailing competition now awards the Jules Verne Trophy to the boat that sails around the world without stopping and with no outside assistance in the shortest time.  In 2009, 12 celebrities formed a relay to raise money for the charity, Children in Need.  These are only a few examples of challenges inspired by Verne's book.

However, I am going to share the race of a specific woman named Nellie Bly.  Actually, her given name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, but the first newspaper editor to hire her named her Nellie Bly.  Aspiring to succeed in the big city of New York, Nellie proposed to Joseph Pulitzer in 1887 to replicate Verne's 80-day race around the world.  Her trip of 24,899 miles used steamships, railroads, and the White Star liner, "Oceanic," dressing for her adventure in a single dress, an overcoat, several changes of underwear, carrying a travel bag for toiletries, and with a hidden bag tied around her neck containing bank notes and gold.  She completed the race in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds!

Next week's blog will share an even more dramatic challenge accomplished by the courageous Nellie Bly.        

Imagination or Predictions?

Jules Verne

Isaac Werner did not have a horse, and he broke the sod for his timber claim by hand, gently placing the cuttings of cottonwood trees into the virgin prairie soil, and hand weeding the sunflowers that tried to steal the meager rainfall from the young trees.  He traded his labor with neighbors who had horses to break the tough prairie sod.  Only after several years did he finally buy a horse and the simple implements needed to work his land.  What would he have thought of the massive tractors and implements that farmers of today use in farming the same land?  Isaac knew about trains, but what would he have thought of airplanes?  Even with his imagination and gift for invention, what would he have thought of space ships landing on the moon?

I could not help but think of Isaac when I watched the successful launches of passenger rockets developed by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson soar into the sky in the summer of 2021, carrying the first passengers into space on privately funded spacecraft.

H. G. Wells

Men have long dreamed of space travel, and for decades fiction has predicted it.  Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, both sometimes called the "father of science fiction" have written of unbelievable achievements.  Jules Verne tended to keep his adventures earthbound, with books like Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Twenty Leagues Under the Seas (1870).  It was H. G. Wells who made flying a part of his science fiction, with books like The War of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men on the Moon (1901)  However, it is Arthur C. Clarke who probably came closest to predicting most accurately the potential for future space travel.

Not only that, however, he described many other things that came into existence in a form quite consistent with his descriptions.  For example, in 1959 he wrote about a 'personal transceiver' small enough to carry, with which personal communication worldwide would be possible and global positioning could avoid getting lost.  These are the things we take for granted now with our smart phones.  In an interview five years later he described telecommuting and telemedicine.

Arthur C. Clarke

However, it was a short story competition in 1948 that caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick that led to Clarke and Kubrick developing the story into a novel and a movie in 1964, which may have fueled the imaginations of many people to believed that space travel would someday be possible.  Consider some of the other projections from "2001: A Space Odyssey" that have come true, particularly the iPad, and computer software that was able to read lips (which allowed H.A.L to know what the humans were saying.)

Clarke's stories have predicted what he called 'automatic control cars;' the potential of enabling a satellite to remain in a fixed orbit to transmit radio and television signals; and remarkably, he predicted in 1947 the year of the first moon rocket to be 1959.

Some of his predictions remain unfulfilled, like settlements on Venus and Mars by 1980.  But, that does not belittle the potential influence he may have had on the dreamers of today, like Jeff Bezos and  Richard Branson.