I remember watching “Around the World in 80 Days” when I was a kid. I liked that movie, starring David Niven and Shirley MacLaine. It came out, on this date, in 1956. Of course, I didn’t see it until many years later. It was based on the book by Jules Verne.
The plot, loosely, is this. It takes place in 1872. That is when an English gentleman named Phileas Fogg (David Niven) boasts that he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days. So, he makes a big bet. The wager is for 20,000 pounds, which today is worth around £1.8 million, and that turns into 2,324,698.20 U.S. dollars. Big dollars. He makes this bet with four skeptical fellow members of the “Reform Club,” and Fogg says he can arrive back eighty days from exactly 8:45 pm that evening. Hence the title.
The race happened in real life. On November 14, 1889, two women took the challenge and bet against one another. Nellie Bly was a young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper. She took off from New York City, headed east, by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. The other person in the race was Elizabeth Bisland. She too, was a young reporter for the Cosmopolitan magazine. She left by train, headed west. The goal for each woman was to outdo Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg and circle the globe in less than eighty days — and of course, do it faster than the other woman. Spoiler alert: Nellie Bly won.
Since then, others have raced around the globe by various methods, all in the name of… all in the name of… I’m not sure what the point is, really. But there they went, and there they still go. Spinning.
And all of this started in the mind of one man, a long time ago. Jules Verne. He wrote the novel, Around the World in 80 Days, way back in 1872. This was his third big, bestselling novel, the first two being Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).
Jules Verne was brimming with travel and adventure in his head. And all for good reason. He was born (1828) in France, in a city on the Atlantic coast called Nantes. About the time when he turned six years old, Verne was sent to boarding school. He had a fine teacher named Madame Sambin. Unfortunately for Mrs. Sambin, her husband, a naval captain, had disappeared some 30 years before, at sea. So during class, Mrs. Sambin would often tell the students — at great length — that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise.
If you ask me, I think she planted some big thoughts in little Jules’ head. The theme of the Robinson Crusoe would stay with Verne throughout his life. The stories of a traveling ship captain too.
And that is where the seed was planted.
The beginning. All of this, all these books and movies, all these people moving their real lives, just to move around the planet, all because of this one idea that sprouted up in a classroom, back in 1834.
A kid, in Dayton, Ohio, watching the movie on a black and white TV, in complete awe, who now, is relaying the story to you. We can all thank Madame Sambin for this one.
If nothing else, it should remind us how important we are. The things we do, the things we say. We should always remember that these things go out, they go forward, they move through the Universe in ways that will never be known to us. Our thoughts, our words, our actions, all become things. Pieces of the bigger story.
All traveling. Around the world.
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“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
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“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
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“It is the story that matters not just the ending.”
― Paul Lockhart
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Around the world we go, we go
