Joseph Haydn composes his two great oratorios,…

The first railroad charter in the U.S. is given to John Stevens and others on February 6, 1815, for the New Jersey Railroad.

The charter essentially gives Stevens and his partners, through the Camden & Amboy Railroad, a monopoly on railroads in the state of New Jersey.

Robert Livingston Stevens, the second son of John Stevens, invents the T rail in 1830.

Soon after, he will invent the railroad spike and develop a more efficient system of laying railroad roadbeds.

Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane), a pioneer woman journalist inspired by Jules Verne,  begins an attempt to beat travel around the world in less than eighty days on November 14, 1888. (Bly will finish the journey in seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes).

In 1888 Bly had suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time.

A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boards the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and begins her 40,070 kilometer journey.

She takes with her the dress she is wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials.

She carries most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.

Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in seventy-two days, arriving back in January 25, 1890.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan has sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly.

Bisland has traveled the opposite way around the world, starting on the same day as Bly took off.

Bly, however, had not learned of Bisland’s journey until reaching Hong Kong. She dismissed the cheap competition. "I would not race," she said. "If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern."

To sustain interest in the story, the New York World had organized a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match" in which readers were asked to estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.

During her travels around the world, Bly had gone through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.

The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph has allowed Bly to send short progress reports, although longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and thus were often delayed by several weeks.

Bly has traveled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race.

During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and, in Singapore, she bought a monkey

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship RMS Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule.

However, after World owner Joseph Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 pm.

Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly is back in New York.

She has circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the entire journey.

Bisland is, at this time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later.

She also had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothnia) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria).

Bly's journey is a world record, although it will be bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, whose first circumnavigation in 1870 possibly had been the inspiration for Verne's novel.

A wharf fire at the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, owned by the North German Lloyd Steamship line, spreads to German passenger ships Saale, Main, and Bremen on June 30, 1900.

The fire engulfs the adjacent piers and nearby ships, killing three hundred and twenty-six people.