Nellie Bly successfully completes her round-the-world race in 72 days

When investigative journalist Nellie Bly arrived in New Jersey on 25 January 1890, a scene of celebration greeted her. Jersey City station was “packed with thousands of people” who had all gathered together to witness history. As she leapt down from the train carriage, “one yell went up from [the crowd], and the cannons at the Battery and Fort Greene boomed out the news of [Bly’s] arrival”. The globetrotter wrote in her 1890 account of her trip, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, that she “took off [her] cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in 72 days, but because I was home again”.

For the past two and a half months, Bly had journeyed across the globe, racing to catch trains, battling with nausea on steamships, navigating rickshaws and even riding astride horses and donkeys. Her exploits had taken her across the Atlantic Ocean, through Europe, the Arabian Sea and Far East, and then back across the Pacific. Such exotic adventures would likely have seemed a world away to a young Bly – born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 – who spent her early childhood in Apollo, a small Pennsylvanian mill town. Bly said that as a young girl she had been possessed by a voracious appetite