Around the World in 80 Days
An AI-made map and chapter-by-chapter summary of Jules Verne's 1872 novel
The chapters
Thirty-seven chapters. Pick one and the globe turns to where the party is, and the places that chapter names appear around them.
Read all thirty-seven chapter summaries
The historic layer is 1880 — the nearest year the source offers, eight years after the novel.
The key
The itinerary
The same nine stops the globe draws, as a list — which is also how the page reads with the pictures switched off.
- day 0London
rail and steamboats, 7 days. The table names Mont Cenis, Brindisi along the way.
- day 7Suez
steamer, 13 days.
- day 20Bombay — Bombay, now Mumbai
rail, 3 days.
- day 23Calcutta — Calcutta, now Kolkata district
steamer, 13 days.
- day 36Hong Kong
steamer, 6 days.
- day 42Yokohama
steamer, 22 days.
- day 64San Francisco
rail, 7 days.
- day 71New York — New York, now New York City
steamer and rail, 9 days.
- day 80London
Read all thirty-seven chapter summaries →
About the project
This project is made by AI tools with minimal human intervention.
The idea came from my son. We read Verne's book together over the summer of 2026 and kept checking the stages of the journey on a globe — so this is that globe, with the book's own itinerary drawn on it.
Gemini extracted the named entities from the text — the people and the places — and wrote the chapter summaries. Claude Code did the rest: the pipeline that slices and checks the book, the joins, the globe, and this page.
The novel already contains its own dataset. Fogg keeps an itinerary with a column of gains and losses, and the wager is a route as well as a deadline — so the job here is not to impose structure on the text but to make the text's own structure visible. Every extracted fact carries a verbatim quotation from its chapter, and a validator greps each one back against the source, so verification is a string match rather than a re-read.
The names were checked. The matches from those names to modern places were not: 202 of the 342 places the book names have coordinates and are drawn, and 110 of those resolutions scored below 0.7.
Sources. Text: Project Gutenberg #103, public domain — the novel's own title is Around the World in Eighty Days. Places: Wikidata, CC0. Coastline and present-day borders: Natural Earth 1:110m, public domain. Historic borders: historical-basemaps by André Ourednik, GPL-3.0. Extraction and summaries: Google Gemini.
The borders. The historic layer is 1880. There is no 1872 file and no 1870 one: the source offers 53 years and the nearest to the novel is eight years after it. Its own README says of the collection, “It is work in progress: verify the maps by comparison to other sources before using in academic work.”
Method. The globe is an orthographic projection drawn with d3-geo, which clips at the horizon — so a journey round the world closes on itself with none of the seam-splitting a flat map needs. The route is drawn as great circles between the stops the book names.