This year, October 2 is a Sunday. What better day to celebrate the famous (and fictional!) 1872 wager that launched a (fictional) world-wide voyage:
“I will bet twenty thousand pounds against anyone who wishes, that I will make the tour of the world in eighty days or less....As today is Wednesday, the second of October, I shall be due in London, in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the twenty-first of December, at a quarter before nine PM; or else the twenty thousand pounds . . . will belong to you.”
Circling the globe was impossible, a long time ago. Sailing ships made the feat possible, but it was rare and remarkable and time-consuming. It took years, not days, to do it. So, when Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days in the late 1800s, such a feat did seem very science fiction.
Luckily, Jules Verne wrote science fiction! He had his main character, Phileas Fogg, travel by rail and steamship (and the occasional elephant, hot air balloon, etc.) from London to Egypt, then onto India, Hong Kong, Japan, San Francisco (California), New York City, and back to London. Do you think that Fogg gets back to London in time to make it to the room in the Reform Club on Saturday, December 21, at 8:45 p.m.?
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