Suddenly Nellie had a competitor: Cosmopolitan Magazine was sending its own woman reporter around the world to break Fogg’s record – and beat Nellie in the process.
Cosmopolitan was run by an alfalfa millionaire named John Brisben Walker, who specialized in copying a good idea when he saw one. Riding to work on Nov. 14, 1889, Walker read the World’s account of Nellie setting off on her around-the-world journey that day and immediately recognized the commercial brilliance of the story. He wanted in on that success and summoned his own woman reporter, Elizabeth Brisland, to his office that morning, while dispatching his editor to arrange travel with Thomas Cook and Son down the street. Brisland was very much the opposite of Nellie Bly: a serious writer, more interested in poetry than journalism, with absolutely no interest in going around the world. She turned down Walker without hesitation. But Walker used both a carrot ($3000 a year for two years as a full-time employee) and stick (she would be fired if she refused) approach, and within a half-hour Bisland agreed to leave that afternoon.
Bisland would head west, taking the Union Pacific to San Francisco and then a ship to Yokohama. Seeking to capitalize on the World’s huge publicity, Walker approached Pulitzer and offered to wager $1000 against Pulitzer’s $500 that Bisland would arrive home first. The World, not wanting to give Cosmopolitan the free publicity, mentioned in passing that “it had declined the offer.”
Bisland left the evening of Nov. 14, 1889, spotting Nellie less than a 12-hour head start, and was able to cross the country in five days, with only one connection between New York and San Francisco. But her ship to Yokohama, the Oceanic, would not leave until the 21st, and so she spent two nights at the Palace Hotel, the most opulent hotel in San Francisco and the largest in the country. On Nov. 25, 1889 she set sail across the Pacific aboard the Oceana, just as Nellie was leaving Brindisi to cross the Mediterranean.
The race was on.
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