How Did Annie Londonderry Rock the World on a Bicycle?

The first woman to ride around the world on a bicycle embarked in 1894, a time when it was still a little scandalous for women to ride bikes at all. Learn the story of Annie 'Londonderry' Kopchovsky in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/annie-londonderry.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vohlabamb here. It's hard to imagine now, but there
was a time when riding a bicycle was deemed unsafe
and unladylike. The safety issue had some merit. Early versions
in the eighteen hundreds had features like no pedals and

(00:23):
leather tires, but in the eighteen eighties the Safety Bike
rolled onto the scene and changed everything. Unlike previous iterations,
the Safety featured two similar sized wheels, a chain and gears,
and as the name implied, the Safety provided a safer,
more stable ride, and at that point women began riding

(00:45):
more often, despite doctor's warnings that they'd strained themselves in
moral panic that they might down indecent for the time
kneelink bloomers instead of full length skirts. One such woman
was Annie Cohen Kopchowski, also known as Annie Londonderry, who
at age twenty three, displayed a remarkable amount of kutzpa, moxie,

(01:06):
and good old perseverance when she set out on an
around the world cycling adventure. Annie Cohen was born in
Lafia in eighteen seventy, before her family emigrated to the
United States and settled in the West End of Boston
in eighteen seventy five. She married one Max Koupschowski in
eighteen eighty eight, who, funnily enough made his business as
a peddler get it a peddler anyway. They had three

(01:31):
children by eighteen ninety two, all under the age of six.
At this point, millions of men and women both had
taken up cycling, but not Annie. For the article of
this episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke by email
with Peter Zeitlin, her great grand nephew and the author
of a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction book about
his famous ancestor. He explained she was a working mother

(01:54):
of three small children, which left little time for a
hobby such as cycling. The family lived in a tenement flat,
and in addition to running a busy household, Kopschowsky sold
advertising for several Boston newspapers. She was, by all accounts
good at her job, but out of necessity she had
developed the art of the hustle. She had no doubt

(02:16):
heard of Thomas Stevens, the British Man who was the
first person to cycle across the US and the world
in eighteen eighty four, and she certainly would have read
the eighteen eighty nine chronicle of intrepid journalist Nelly Bly,
who set out to beat the world record of Jules
Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, circumnavigating the globe in eighty days,
which Bli did, finishing in just seventy two. But back

(02:37):
to Kopchowski. She decided in February of eighteen ninety four
that she would make an attempt to become the first
woman to bicycle around the world, despite being a complete
novice with only two or maybe three riding lessons under
her belt at the time. Zeuitlin wrote in his nonfiction
book the bicycle represented to Annie a literal vehicle to

(02:58):
the fame, freedom, and material wealth she so craved. Her
proposed journey could provide the opportunity to refashion her identity
and create a new life for herself. So on June
twenty fifth of eighteen ninety four, she announced to a
crowd of supporters that she was leaving, telling them she
was making the trip to settle a bet between two

(03:18):
wealthy Boston merchants that no woman could travel around the
world by bicycle. She would cycle around the world in
fifteen months without any money, with only the clothes on
her back, She would not only have to earn her way,
but also return with five thousand dollars in her pocket
in order to win the bet, and ten thousand dollars
to boot Zeitlin said there remains a lot of mystery

(03:41):
surrounding the origins of her trip, including whether it might
have been part of a marketing scheme for Columbia Bicycles,
but she earned money as she went in several ways.
She sold space on her clothing and her bike to advertisers.
She pioneered sports related marketing for women, including her namesake sponsor,
the London Dairy Lithia Springs Water Company of New Hampshire.
The company paid one hundred dollars to finance the journey.

(04:04):
As her fame grew, she was able to sell souvenir
photos of herself and her autograph, and gave lectures about
her travels, at which an admission view was charged. She
also sometimes made guest appearances with her bike in stores
along the way to attract customers, for which she was
also paid. Early in her travels, Kopchowski was dubbed Annie
Londonderry after her sponsor, which was probably as much a

(04:25):
public relations move as anything else. But the journey was
not without trouble. She wasted time early in the trip,
spending a full month in New York City, ostensibly in
the name of publicity. The bicycle itself slowed her down,
weighing forty two pounds that's nineteen kilos, the bike was
not built for speed. Once in Chicago, she switched to

(04:46):
a men's sterling model, weighinged as twenty one pounds or
nine and a half kilos. Even with this improvement, her
road conditions were often rugged. Frustrated by her original riding
costume of a split skirt suit with bloomers underneath, at
the time she reached Chicago, she shed the skirt for
riding bloomers only, and eventually donned men's suits for the
remainder of her trip. Scandalous Interestingly, Kopchowsky only made it

(05:11):
as far west as Chicago because she realized that at
the pace she was riding, should never make her goal. Instead,
she hopped on her new lighter bike and rode back
to New York, where she caught a boat to France
and continued via bicycle, train and boat to finish the journey,
She logged thousands of miles on her bicycle, riding through France,
North Africa, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Sigone, and Hong Kong before

(05:32):
hopping another steamer for San Francisco and riding from there
back to Chicago. She didn't always divulge that information, however,
She told more than a few tall tales, often embellishing
her speeches and interviews with adventures of hunting tigers, dodging bullets,
or being waylaid by robbers. Zeitlin said Annie was a

(05:54):
showwoman at heart and a gifted racin tour. She set
out to make a sensation of herself and had a
keen sense of how to build her fame. If that
meant stretching the truth to make herself more quotable to
a reporter or more entertaining to an audience, she had
no qualms about doing that. Fame was her fuel, and
the more famous she became, the easier it was to
earn the money she needed to keep going. The press

(06:18):
was sometimes merciless about her choice of dress and her
gall and choice to leave her family in the first place,
but the public loved her, and cycling clubs around the
world joined her at various points during her ride. Koptchowski
finished the journey on Thursday, September twelfth of eighteen ninety
five in Chicago, fourteen days ahead of schedule, as she

(06:39):
claimed to have received the ten thousand dollars, but in
a more recent New York Times obituary, it appears she
never received the money from the wager, and in his reporting,
Zuitln determined that the wager never existed. She returned to
her family and had another child in eighteen ninety seven.
Cycling was never an important part of her life again.

(06:59):
She briefly left her family and lived in northern California,
then returned again. She and her husband lived in the Bronx,
New York, operating a small clothing business. In the nineteen twenties,
their business was destroyed by a fire, and she used
the insurance money to start another business in Manhattan. She
would die of a stroke on November eleventh of nineteen
forty seven, at the age of seventy seven. Kopchowski's adventure

(07:23):
was covered by the global media at a time when
women's suffrage was a prominent issue. Zeitlin said countless women
would have been aware of her journey and that she
was making it to prove that a woman could do
what only a man had done before, circle the world
by bicycle. What is widely underappreciated is how the humble
bicycle transformed the lives of women around the turn of

(07:44):
the twentieth century. A few months after Kopchowski's journey, Susan B.
Anthony told an interviewer that quote, bicycling has done more
to emancipaid women than anything in the world. Today's episode
is based on the article Annie Londonderry Bicycle Around the
World and into the record books on HowStuffWorks dot Com,

(08:06):
written by Patti Rasmusen Breen. Stuff is production of by
Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com, and it
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