Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days, serialized in 1872, used the existing global network of railways, steamships, and telegraph to dramatize the idea that the planet had been shrunk by modern speed.

Verne's novel became one of the most widely read works of the century, popularizing a new literary genre of the technologically-enabled adventure; it crystallized the cultural obsession with travel speed and inspired the real 1889 race by journalist Nellie Bly.