Nellie Bly walked into her editor’s office at the New York World in 1889 with an idea. Jules Verne had written a novel about going around the world in eighty days. She wanted to do it for real and beat the number. Her editor said the paper had been thinking about it, and that they would send a man. A woman would need a chaperone and a dozen trunks.

She told him to start the man. She would start the same day for another paper and beat him.

She got the assignment. On November 14 she boarded a steamer in Hoboken with a single small bag, a dress she had made in two days, and a coat. No chaperone. No trunks. She was twenty five years old, and two years earlier she had gotten herself committed to an asylum for ten days to write about how the patients were treated, so nobody at the World was inclined to bet against her.

She crossed the Atlantic, took a detour in France to meet Verne himself, and went on through Italy, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. She sent dispatches by cable when she could and by mail when she could not. A rival magazine put its own reporter on the route in the opposite direction the same day, hoping to beat her home. Bly did not learn about the race until she was halfway around the world. She did not change her plans.

A storm in the Pacific put her ship days behind. When she landed in San Francisco the World chartered a train to run her across the country nonstop. She stepped onto the platform in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, seventy two days, six hours, and eleven minutes after she left. The crowd was so large the police could not hold it. The rival reporter arrived four days later.

Bly did not have the fastest ship or the best route. What she had was a refusal to wait for permission, one bag, and the nerve to start before anyone had agreed she should. That is most of the trick. Pack light. Start now.