Movie-A-Day #318: Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

On this date in 1889, pioneering woman journalist Nellie Bly of the New York World newspaper (sort of the plucky Mary Tyler Moore of her time) began her journey to find out if the time frame in Jules Verne’s popular novel “Around the World in 80 Days” was possible. Armed with only the clothes on her back, a small travel bag and a modest stash of money, she set out over the Atlantic, then across Asia, the Pacific Ocean and the western United States using only steamships and railroads. Along the way, she stopped to interview Verne, visited a leper colony and even bought a monkey. She made most of the journey unchaperoned (highly rare for the times) and made her return to New York on January 25, 1890 – just 72 days later.