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On September 24^th, 1895, the New York Times reported that:

Miss Annie Londonderry arrived in this city this morning, after a trip around the world on a bicycle. Miss Londonderry is nursing a broken arm, the result of a bad fall sustained in one of the western towns. On June 20, 1894, she started on her trip around the world. She was given a good send off by several hundred friends, who were at the statehouse, where the start was made. Her trip, she says, was made upon a wager. She was to receive $10,000 if she finished the journey in fifteen months, and she feels proud of the record has made. On Thursday September 12th, the journey came to an end in Chicago, fourteen days ahead of the time allowed. In addition to the purse of $10,000, which she says was handed over to her by the parties making the wager, Miss Londonderry also accumulated $3,000 from lectures given in several countries, and also by participating in exhibitions of bicycle riding.

It’s a sober account of an extraordinary feat, and this account is among those that give Annie credit as the world’s first female international sports star. Susan B. Anthony once said that the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else, that it gave woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance, and that once on the seat, “away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood” (Weber), and surely nothing could be more free and untrammeled than to hop on your own two wheels and circumnavigate the globe?

What the New York Times presumably didn’t know was that almost everything they reported in that news blurb was … well … maybe not strictly accurate. Annie was an international sports star, but the emphasis there is on star. She was a P.T. Barnum-level entertainer. She knew how to spin both her wheels and her story. So let’s take a closer look.

The Beginning of the Legend

The deception begins with the very first word: Miss. Annie wasn’t a Miss. She was a Mrs. Annie Cohen was born to a Jewish family in Latvia. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a child, and in 1888, at about the age of 18, she married a peddler named Max Kopchovsky. The couple soon had three children. So by the standards of the day, her name was Mrs. Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, and she had a very definite role to play in life, and it didn’t involve words like international or sports or star.

Another point the New York Times missed was that there was no wager and no $10,000. But it’s hardly the reporter’s fault because that is certainly what Annie told everyone on multiple continents. However, she was curiously unspecific about details. Like who was putting up the money. Some of the later news reports include some names, but they have proven hard to track down (Zheutlin, 25). So hard that it seems unlikely they really existed.

The only person, besides Annie, who had anything to gain from her trip was Colonel Albert Pope, the owner of the bicycle company who provided Annie’s ridiculously heavy bicycle. It was great marketing for him, if all went well. If all did not go well, he had a lot of bicycles, and he was only out one. But there’s no evidence that he fronted any money beyond that or that this was his idea (Zheutlin, 35). Given Annie’s later behavior, it seems more likely that it was her idea, and she sweet-talked him into donating the bicycle. She was good at that.

It’s possible that she didn’t inform him of a highly salient point, which was that she didn’t know how to ride a bicycle. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to decide to pedal around the world before you’ve even pedaled down the street, but Annie was not lacking in chutzpah. She took a couple of lessons in the days leading up to her official start date (Zheutlin, 13) and called it good.

Pedaling the Wrong Direction

Annie set off from Boston on a fine June day. She had long skirts and a 42-pound bicycle (which, in case you’re not a bicycle person, is heavy). She also had a stack of autographed photos, which she intended to sell along the way. Not being blessed with the funds to travel around the world, Annie was earning her food and lodgings as she went, with photos, advertising for local businesses, and lectures on sports and beauty (Zheutlin, 14).

In New York she told newspapers that the wager included that she must earn $5,000 along the way, which of course made an eager public all the more eager to buy from her. A reporter asked her if she was afraid for her safety, and she said no, she had a revolver. As a poor Jewish housewife, it’s likely she knew no more about revolvers than she did about bicycles.

On September 24, she pedaled into Chicago. Three of her fifteen months were up, and she had traveled 980 miles, or about 4 percent of the earth’s circumference. Even by the standards of the day, this was not very fast. She was going to have to step it up to meet her goal. Annie knew, and you know, that there was, in fact, no wager and no deadline, but she had told an adoring public that there was, so she couldn’t fail. Winter was coming and it was a long, lonely ride across the plains and the mountains to the Pacific. Clearly, she needed to rethink, and she did.

A New Plan

Annie traded in her 42-pound bicycle for one that weighed 20 pounds. She traded in her long skirts for bloomers. She also traded in her itinerary. Rather than continue west and get to the Rocky Mountains at the onset of winter, she decided to circumnavigate the world in the opposite direction. She would pedal all the way back to New York and hop a boat to Europe.

Which is precisely what she did. Every time she stopped, she sent telegrams to local news offices ahead, to make sure everyone knew when she would arrive. People flocked to see her, which was exactly what she wanted. As for what she told the newspaper reporters, well, she was obviously enjoying herself. She told them she had studied medicine at Harvard, that she never had to sleep outdoors on this trip, that she frequently slept outdoors, and most of all, that she was single. That last one was a necessity, for everyone would have raised an eyebrow if they knew she had left a husband and small children at home. In fact, that was so unthinkable that she rarely had to lie about it. Most everyone just assumed she was single, and she did nothing to correct the idea.

The Other Hemisphere

By November 24^th, she and her bicycle were on board a boat for Le Havre. France was a rude awakening for Annie. For one thing, French customs impounded her bicycle, and she later told the New York World that the terms of her wager did not permit her to speak French (Zheutlin, 56). Which was certainly one way to get out of admitting that she didn’t know any French.

Anyway, French customs agreed to ship her bicycle to Paris, which was fantastic because it meant Annie herself could take the train there. She didn’t pedal at all.

The French press was as eager to write about Annie as the American press, but they had rather a different angle. The Americans had all stressed how pretty and young and vibrant she was, even if she was wearing bloomers. The French saw it differently. Some were quite sure she was not a woman at all. Some said she was a man trying to draw attention to herself. Others said she was a woman, but mannish, without any coquettish mannerisms. And still another said that she was a third sex, similar to neutered worker bees “whose superiority of labor is a result of infertility” (Zheutlin, 58). Not sure what they would have said if she’d known about the three children, but they didn’t know.

What she did tell them was that she was an orphan, a law student, a doctorate of law, an accountant, a reporter, a wealthy heiress, a newspaper owner, the cousin of a congressman, and a niece of a Senator. Like I say, she was enjoying herself hugely.

She was paid to give lectures, which were in English, of course, and she later said that hardly anyone could understand her, but she peppered them with Vive la France! And the crowd cheered and all was well (Zheutlin, 60).

From Paris, Annie cycled south to Charite-sur-Loire, where she hopped a train for 170 miles further to Lyon. If the newspapers liked to assume she had pedaled from Paris to Lyon, well, they were free to believe that. She didn’t contradict them. And she was on her bicycle when she continued on her way to Marseilles.

On January 20th, Annie boarded a boat that took her to Alexandria, Egypt. It is just barely possible that she took a side trip to Jerusalem, as she later said she did, but she wouldn’t have had much time. The boat itself continued through the Suez Canal and around the tip of India to what is now Sri Lanka. There is a reference in the local paper to a lady cyclist, though unnamed. She is named in the newspapers at the next port of call in Singapore. And then in Saigon and Hong Kong and Shanghai and Nagasaki and Yokohama.

Clearly, Annie was apprising these newspaper offices in advance of her arrival, for she was hardly in each place long enough to get noticed in person (Zheutlin, 73-81). It took her a mere seven weeks to travel from Europe to the far edge of Asia, and to be blunt, the bicycle doesn’t go that fast (Zheutlin, 69). The Japanese newspapers reported a statement that was more true: Annie was circumnavigating the world with a bicycle, not on one (Zheutlin, 82).

Completion (Of a Sort)

On March 9^th, Annie and her bicycle boarded a steamship for San Francisco. She was nine months into her trip, and she had certainly picked up speed. She had also, according to her own account, picked up $1500 and she needed $5000 to meet the terms of her wager. She lectured for payment even on the boat before she got to San Francisco. Every lecture was an opportunity to refine and enhance her story.

From San Francisco, she biked south. Theoretically, she biked across the desert into Arizona, and she told tales of being refused water at houses she stopped at. Which might have been true, but some people suspect she and her bicycle took a train before making a big newsworthy splash in Phoenix and Tucson. She was certainly on a train into New Mexico (Zheutlin, 103).

An El Paso news report gives us a hint about some of her logistics because you might be wondering about clothes and other necessities on this 15-month trip? Annie had trunks. She just shipped them on ahead of her, so they were already in her destination. That part was common enough practice for travelers of the time, so it’s probably true, but other things she told that poor, unsuspecting El Paso reporter were patently untrue. Like harrowing tales of hunting Bengal tigers in India, visiting political prisoners in Siberia, taking a bullet wound as she pedaled through a battlefield, and languishing in a Japanese prison. She also told him that the terms of her wager forbade her to get married on the trip.

Actually, the reason she couldn’t get married was because she already was married, but she never mentioned that part. Instead, she told the reporter she had received nearly 200 proposals while on her trip, and that she had written refusals to 147 of them. Which makes me wonder what she was doing with the other 50 or so? Leaving them unanswered? Stringing them along with false hopes? Or maybe all these numbers were completely fabricated. I don’t know about a proposal, but the poor El Paso reporter had obviously taken a shine to her. He reported that “any horrid man who says she is not good looking ought to be taken out back of a cow shed and knocked in the head with an axe” (Zheutlin, 106). Quite a different reception from those reporters in France.

Not all the reporters were as smitten. As Annie traveled up through Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Raton, Denver, and Cheyenne, reporters repeatedly hedged their words about her claims, suggesting that not everything she said was true. Between most of these destinations, it is unclear exactly what her mode of travel was. Certainly she cycled some of it, as she found local companions who joined her for a while before turning back. But the newspaper in Cheyenne reported that she left on a train and that part certainly seems true because she was in Omaha, Nebraska, 400 miles east only two days later. But at least at one point, Annie brushed away any concerns about train travel by saying the terms of her wager allowed her a certain about train travel. Or by saying the terms of her wager allowed train travel as long as she wired ahead first to ask permission of the stakeholders.

Annie completed her circumnavigation by arriving in Chicago on September 12, 1895, but the local papers failed to notice. A few days later, she was in New York and the local paper did notice. They printed the news blurb I read at the top of the episode. The one that said she had collected her $10,000. There’s certainly no evidence that she did.

Fifteen months to the day since she left Boston, she arrived back in Boston (Zheutlin, 132).

The Legacy

There was never again anything international, sports, or star about Annie’s life. She settled back down with her husband and had a fourth child. She had a brief stint as a journalist. Then she went west alone and worked as saleswoman. Then she came back and with her husband opened a clothing business together.

In the end, it’s a little hard to know what to think about Annie. For someone who didn’t know how to ride a bike when she started, she really did cycle an incredible amount: certainly across much of the United States and some of France. That is well beyond my athletic ability. But she most certainly did not cycle as much as she said she did, and the fact that a working class mother of three circumnavigated the globe by any means of transport in the 1890s is no trivial accomplishment.

It may interest you to know that since Annie’s time there are a handful of other women who have pedaled their way around the world. The difference is that nowadays the Guinness Book of World Records has set clear rules on what you have to do to claim it, namely that you have to cycle for at least 18,000 miles (which Annie didn’t) and you have to cross two antipodal points (which Annie also didn’t). On the other hand, the Guinness Book of World Records didn’t even exist when Annie made her journey, so she got to make the rules. And she did.

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Selected Sources

Doubek, James. “Lael Wilcox Rode around the World and Then Went for Another Bike Ride.” NPR, September 18, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/nx-s1-5108892/cyclist-lael-wilcox-bike-around-the-world-record.

New York Times. “Miss Londonderry’s Trip Ended.” September 25, 1895. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1895/09/25/102473762.pdf.

Weber, Bruce. “Overlooked No More: Annie Londonderry, Who Traveled the World by Bicycle.” The New York Times, November 6, 2019, sec. Obituaries. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/obituaries/annie-londonderry-overlooked.html.

Zheutlin, Peter. Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride. Kensington Publishing Corp., 2008.