The Woman Who Made The World Believe She Biked Around It

Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, later famous as “Annie Londonderry,” was born near Riga, Latvia, around 1870 to a Jewish family that moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was very young. Both of her parents died before 1887 and left their teenage daughter orphaned. Nothing in this common, rough beginning suggested Annie would go on a world tour. Everything thereafter was of her own making.

In 1892, Annie was 22 years old, married since 1888 to an Orthodox Jewish peddler named Max Kopchovsky, and mother to three small children, Mollie, Libbie, and Simon, all under the age of six. The Kopchovskys occupied a cramped apartment in the Boston West End tenement while Annie sold advertising space in Boston’s daily newspapers, a mundane-sounding gig that would come in handy later.

By June of 1894, Annie had realized that her ability to sell ads to Boston newspapers would help her get a sponsor. Since no one was going to shell out money to see an ordinary woman ride a bicycle, Annie had to find something spectacular to make herself worthy of sponsors and reporters. She settled on the perfect combination: a sensational wager along with a lucrative sponsorship. Neither was true, but both were achievable through the art of advertising.

Annie said that two unnamed wealthy Boston men placed a bet on her. They wagered $10,000 against $20,000 that no woman would be able to bicycle around the world in 15 months and still earn $5,000 during the journey. There’s no record of the two men actually existing. In fact, most historians believe the bet never happened. Even Annie’s biographer, Peter Zheutlin, has concluded the bet was just a ploy to get her name in the papers and convince sponsors to pay her.

To pay for the trip, Annie entered into an agreement with the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company, a New Hampshire company that bottled water. For $100, she would attach an advertisement placard to her bicycle and ride as “Annie Londonderry” rather than by her own name. It wasn’t actually her name, though it sounded more legitimate to those keeping score. It was simply an advertising ploy, and one that conveniently masked her true identity as a Jewish immigrant to the public she sought to attract.

Annie Londonderry left the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill on June 25, 1894, cheered on by 500 or so well-wishers and leaving Max and the couple’s three children. Annie brought only a spare change of underwear and a pearl-handled revolver. The bike she rode was a heavy, 42-pound “women’s” model, and she dressed for it in a long skirt, a high-collared jacket, and a corset.

Annie bicycled for over three months, from late June to September 1894, as she traveled across dirt roads to Chicago, Illinois, all while wearing Victorian skirts and a corset. This was grueling: She lost about 20 pounds during the ride. By the time she arrived in Chicago on September 24, 1894, she was totally exhausted and close to collapse, and still far from the speed of travel she’d envisioned.

In October 1894, in Chicago, Annie faced winter and mountains she couldn’t negotiate in skirts while straddling a 42-pound bicycle. She made a radical adjustment to her itinerary. She traded her bike for a 21-pound men’s Sterling without brakes, swapped her skirts for bloomers and riding trousers, and realized that nowhere did the rules demand that she travel due west. Instead, she turned around and headed east to catch a boat to Europe before winter set in.

Annie left New York by way of the French steamship La Touraine on November 24, 1894, arriving at Le Havre, France on December 3, 1894. This was one of a number of ocean voyages that were necessary to carry Annie and her bicycle when pedal power fell short. Her bike was seized by French customs officers for failure to pay import duty, but she convinced them otherwise and rode onward through France.

In December 1894, Annie rode the wave of the country’s cycling craze all the way to paid lectures and appearances in cities like Paris and Marseille. She won audiences with shouts of “Vive la France,” and the French press nicknamed her La Femme Machine, or the Machine Woman. She wasn’t merely making it through the journey anymore. She was putting on a show.

Annie departed from Marseille, France, on January 20, 1895, traveling aboard the steamship Sydney through the Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal, and Indian Ocean, docking in Alexandria, Egypt; Aden, Yemen; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Singapore; and Hong Kong. Each time she disembarked briefly, Annie posed for photographs and collected U.S. consular stamps proving that she had visited. She earned money by selling souvenir photo cards for 10 to 25 cents and giving paid talks. She rode her bicycle just a few miles at a time, staying within the port towns.

In Annie’s interviews with reporters throughout Asia, she said she was an orphan without any relatives. She was a Harvard law student, a medical school graduate, and an heiress. She also claimed to be a big-game tiger hunter in India, a war correspondent who had been shot through the shoulder in the Sino-Japanese War, and once a prisoner in Japan. She also omitted that she had a husband and three children, to project an image of being unmarried and unencumbered. The records showed she had not gone anywhere except between major ports, and none of these stories was true.

Annie arrived in San Francisco, California, by the steamship Belgic on March 23, 1895, concluding her trip across the Pacific Ocean. Now a true celebrity, Annie was enthusiastically welcomed into the United States. She still had one last race ahead of her: getting from San Francisco to Chicago in time for the completion of her 15-month journey.

While touring California in the spring of 1895, Annie kept herself in the news by having photographs taken that included a masked actor holding her up at gunpoint in the hills. The whole thing was a publicity stunt that sold souvenir pictures and made the newspapers happy.

Annie rode thousands of real miles on dirt roads across California, Arizona, Texas, and other states until 1895. However, on some of the most arduous desert and mountain terrain in the American Southwest, contemporary newspaper travel schedules indicate she hitched rides on Southern Pacific Railroad trains in order to maintain her speed. It was by no means uncommon for circumnavigators to combine road travel with train travel in order to keep their averages up.

In August 1895, while in Iowa, Annie crashed after being hit by a herd of pigs crossing the road, injuring her arm and wrist. She continued toward Chicago, putting her arm in a cast and sling. Local newspapers debated whether the injury was a broken bone or merely a sprain exaggerated for publicity purposes.

Annie arrived in Chicago, Illinois, in September 1895, still riding her Sterling, her injured arm in a sling following the accident in Iowa. She was 14 days ahead of schedule; she had given herself 15 months to complete the trip when she departed from Boston. By then, she had covered more than 24,000 miles by bike, steamship, and train, though she only actually pedaled a fraction of that.

On September 24, 1895, 12 days after Chicago, Annie completed the circuit, returning to the Massachusetts State House by train and bicycle. Her husband Max and their three children, whom she had been away from for 15 months, welcomed her home as she announced the completion of her trip around the world. Annie was paid through ads she sold, photo souvenir postcards, and lecture fees she solicited, because the $10,000 wager she’d publicized never materialized.

In October 1895, Annie relocated her family to New York City to write a feature for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World as “Nellie Bly Jr.,” borrowing the pseudonym of the woman famous for circumnavigating the globe. She debuted with a story about her world tour in the paper on October 20, 1895, and by 1897 she’d left reporting and racing behind.

Annie once again became Mrs. Anna Kopchovsky and moved to the Bronx, New York, where she and her husband Max ran a clothing manufacturing business. Following a stroke, Anna Kopchovsky died in 1947 at age 77. She was quietly laid to rest next to her husband. A researcher’s question about Annie’s story eventually found its way to her great-grandnephew, Boston journalist Peter Zheutlin, who pored over dusty family scrapbooks and newspaper clippings to write his biography.

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