- Home
- Membership
- In 1895, a Chicago housewife left her family to cycle around the world. But was it all a hoax?
In 1895, a Chicago housewife left her family to cycle around the world. But was it all a hoax?
As the 19th century drew to a close, one young woman took on a cycling challenge like no other: to pedal around the globe solo. Peter Zheutlin traces her unbelievable journey
Published: September 25, 2026 at 3:30 PM
Save
- Share on facebook
- Share on twitter
- Share on whatsapp
- Email to a friend
On 12 September 1895, a young woman pedalled into Chicago. Not so remarkable, you might think, but at the time, it was astonishing. Not because the sight of a woman on a bicycle was a novelty – that decade saw a boom in female cyclists – but because this particular rider had completed a circumnavigation of the globe on her steed.
Ad
Or had she really? That’s the $10,000-dollar question. That cyclist, already world famous, was Annie Londonderry. Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, and she was a married Jewish mother of three children, all under the age of six at the time she set out. Her odyssey was, according to the New York World, “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman”.
Born in 1870 or 1871 near Riga in Latvia, Annie Cohen had come to the US with her family in 1875. She married Simon ‘Max’ Kopchovsky in 1888, and within six years had three small children and a job selling advertising space for newspapers. The family lived in Boston’s West End, where immigrants packed into tenement houses, speaking their native languages and cooking traditional foods. It may well have fired the imagination of a young woman curious about the world.
In the 1890s, the bicycle craze was peaking, and round-the-world adventures were capturing the public imagination. Londonderry joined in, not to score a victory for women, though she later cast herself in that light, but because she didn’t want to stay “home with a baby under my apron every year”.
Annie, pictured as a young woman. Even if she didn’t truly complete a full circumnavigation, she did cycle thousands of miles, largely alone | Credit: Alamy
The world for a wager
Londonderry’s improbable journey was reputedly set in motion by a wager between two “wealthy clubmen of Boston”. A $10,000 prize awaited a woman who succeeded in travelling around the world on two wheels; she was to start penniless and earn $5,000 en route, accept no gratuities, make the trip in 15 months, and cover 10,000 miles by bicycle. This was a test not just of a woman’s endurance but also of her ability to fend for herself in unfamiliar lands.
At first glance, Londonderry seemed an unlikely candidate. For a woman of the 1890s to leave her husband and children was scandalous. She was physically unprepossessing – 1.6m tall and weighing around 47kg, although she subsequently claimed there was “nothing better than a wheel to build a woman up” – and had never ridden a bicycle in her life. But riding was a learnable skill. The other traits required – courage, cunning, willpower and chutzpah – could not be taught, but Londonderry, a skilful creator of her own myth, had them in spades.
- Read more | "She saw off bandits with her revolver": the unbelievable adventures of Fanny Bullock Workman
On Monday 25 June 1894, in front of a crowd gathered at the Massachusetts capitol, Londonderry climbed onto a Columbia women’s bicycle produced by the Pope Manufacturing Company – to the delight of that company’s owner, Colonel Albert Pope, who was actively marketing bicycles to women, and for whom Londonderry’s journey would represent a public relations triumph.
After various speeches were delivered, a representative of the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire hung an advertising placard on Londonderry’s bicycle (paying her $100 for the privilege). With a sports marketing savvy rare in the 1890s, she adopted the Londonderry name, which also served to conceal her Jewish heritage.
An advert for Londonderry Lithia Water, which sponsored Annie Cohen Kopchovsky on her adventure. In a marketing stunt, she changed her surname to the company’s name | Credit: Colorado Historic Newspaper
Turning her bicycle, body and name into a mobile billboard was a moneymaking and publicity strategy Londonderry employed in cities around the world. She solicited advertising, attaching banners, placards and ribbons to her bike or clothing to be seen by the thousands who watched her pedal by. She also courted the press. “A bright, vivacious woman, a good talker… in fact, all fired smart,” declared the El Paso Daily Herald. And a French newspaper proclaimed: “She seems made only of muscles and nerves and in spite of her petite size gives the impression of remarkable energy.”
When she set out on her adventure in June 1894, Londonderry “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street”, according to the Boston Evening Transcript. Carrying only a change of undergarments and a pearl-handled revolver, her plan was to ride west. But progress was slow: her bike weighed a whopping 19kg, her long skirts and tailored jacket were ill-suited for the exertions of cycling, the weather was hot, and the physical demands were formidable.
- Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Three months later, having got only as far as Chicago, she decided to abandon the trip, realising that she wouldn’t make it across the continent before winter set in. But her fortunes quickly changed. The Sterling Cycle Works offered her a men’s bicycle half the weight of her Columbia, and she adopted radical new riding attire: bloomers. Enjoying a second wind, Londonderry reversed course and headed to New York. By then, nearly four months had elapsed and she was, in terms of circling the Earth, starting from scratch.
French leave
On 24 November, Londonderry boarded the liner La Touraine for Le Havre. Then she took a train to Paris, where she lingered for several weeks earning money as a human billboard. She left on 30 December, riding through wintry weather over poor roads. It was mid-January by the time she reached Marseilles. Londonderry now had just eight months to compete the circuit – and most of the world still lay ahead. She boarded a French mail boat, the Sydney, and hopped across various seas and oceans, via Alexandria, Yemen and Singapore. Three weeks later, she was in Saigon. From there, she sailed on to Hong Kong and Shanghai, en route to Japan.
On 9 March 1895, Londonderry sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco. By the time she made landfall in the US, she had a series of hyperbolic, apocryphal stories to tell, including being caught up in the Sino-Japanese War. Breathless sensationalism was characteristic of American journalism in the 1890s and Londonderry was on song. Writing in the New York Sunday World in October 1895, she described being imprisoned by the Japanese: “The cell was merely a hut with lattice-work sides. There was no protection from the bitter cold and I suffered keenly. [A] Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese prisoner up to my cell and killed him before my eyes, drinking his blood while the muscles were yet quivering.”
A poster for the first US book on bicycle etiquette (1895), marking the growing popularity of cycling with the middle and upper classes | Credit: Getty Images
Charge for Chicago
In April, Londonderry left San Francisco accompanied by Mark Johnson, a well-known cyclist from the city. Having reached Los Angeles on 18 May, she headed east alone, following the Southern Pacific Railway nearly 200 miles across the desert. Or did she? The Los Angeles Times reported that “if certain railroad men were asked how she crossed the desert, ‘they would wink their other eye’”.
Such was the anticipation in Tucson that spectators clambered up a bell tower clutching telescopes hoping for a glimpse of Londonderry as she came over the horizon. In El Paso, she was the featured attraction at a bicycle meet, riding a tandem with several cycling enthusiasts. “The way Miss Londonderry pulled Bart Allen around the track… greatly amused the crowd,” said the El Paso Daily Herald.
With little more than two months left on the wager clock, Londonderry was still 1,800 miles from Chicago. She headed north, reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming on 19 August. Then, partly by rail and partly by bike, she arrived in Chicago on 12 September – not quite 15 months after leaving Boston.
“I am a journalist and ‘a new woman’ – if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.” So begins Londonderry’s account of her trip, published in the New York Sunday World. She’d ridden thousands of miles, often alone. But did she truly pedal around the world? The evidence suggests not – but, even so, it was no small feat for an anonymous Jewish mother from the tenements of Boston to turn herself into a global celebrity, inspiring countless women along the way, without the modern tools of social media. And the wager? Most likely another of Londonderry’s fictions – a brilliant device to add drama to her singular adventure.
Soon after her return, Londonderry moved her family to New York City, where she had a brief career writing sensational features for the New York World under the byline ‘The New Woman’. She had a fourth child in 1897, and died on 11 November 1947, a year after her husband.
In her scrapbook is a handwritten note to the Sunday editor of the New York World that speaks volumes: “Mr Brisbane, I am not afraid. I’ll take the risk myself.”
Peter Zheutlin is Annie’s great-grand-nephew, and the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press, 2007)
Ad
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Ad
Ad
Loading...
Ad
Loading...