This is the best summary I could come up with:

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In a wild scramble, her editors at Cosmopolitan magazine decided to have her circumnavigate the globe in the opposite direction in an attempt to beat Bly.

Bly was a daredevil reporter perhaps best known for exposing the horrific conditions of an asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and Bisland was a literary critic and poet.

The first leg of Bly’s trip was aboard the “Augusta Victoria,” a brand-new ship with stained glass, shuffleboard games, and starlit concerts.

Bisland, too, noted war ships guarded Aden, which was “valuable; and therefore, like Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Ceylon — like everything much worth having in this part of the world — it is an English possession.”

A week later, a Nevada newspaper read: “The influenza is coming around the world in a good deal faster time than Nellie Bly or her rival will make.”

Nowhere was the difference more stark than the steamships, where a single meal might include soup, fish, beef, duck, potatoes, salad, pastry, cheese, and fruit.

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The original article contains 2,465 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

I’ve read Jules Verne’s book as a kid but I never knew it had actually been done so close after he wrote it, during his lifetime. When he wrote it just 10 earlier it was considered sci-fi.

It should be noted that for the common person it might as well be sci-fi, since Bly and Bisland (and Fogg) had considerable resources behind them and could buy or rent alternatives when a connection inevitably failed.