Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the cabinet of curiosities. The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. Those aren't my words, by the way. They belong to someone who dared to do the impossible, someone we still remember today, Amelia Earhart. She set numerous records during her life, both
as a woman and a pilot. She was the first woman pilot to reach fourteen thousand feet in an airplane, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and the first to fly NonStop from coast to coast across the continental US. And she would have been the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by airplane had she not disappeared during her final trip. But this story isn't
about her. It's about the woman who came before her, the one who, in all respects, paved the way for women like Amelia Earhart to prove their metal before the world. Her name was Annie London Dairy, and while she was born in Latvia in eighteen seventy. She grew up in Boston. She was raised in a tenement along with four other siblings, who all got married and started families of their own,
and Annie was no different. She met a man, Max Kopchovsky, in and the two of them raised three children together. Alongside her sibling families. They supported each other the way families are supposed to, but eventually they fell on hard times and Annie had to find a job to make ends meet. She ended up selling ad space for several Boston newspapers. She held that job for many years, and during her career two things happened. First, bicycle became the
vehicle of choice for the independent traveler. Everywhere she went, someone was zipping up and down the street on two wheels. And second, a man used one of these new fangled machines to travel around the world. Suddenly, people everywhere were wondering if it had been a fluke, could anyone else take on the daunting task of traveling around the globe on just a bicycle? And were only men up to such an endeavor or could a woman handle the journey too?
That was the question too rich Boston aristocrats wanted to have answered, so they made a wager, could a woman go around the world in fifteen months by bicycle. If so, the winner of the bet would get ten thousand dollars, and so would the cyclist. Annie, who had never ridden a bicycle before, volunteered for the challenge. Ten grand would certainly come in handy for her family, but Annie already had several strikes against her in the eyes of the world around her. She was a woman, she was Jewish,
and she was a mother. The idea she would be able to set a world record for circumnavigating the globe on a bicycle sounded laughable to most, which made her want to do it even more. She set out on June from the Massachusetts State House wearing a long skirt and a corset, hardly comfortable for a world cyclist in summertime, and she brought along with her only a change of clothes and a revolver for her safety. As long as the weather held up, she averaged almost ten miles a
day and reached Chicago by late September. The journey was getting harder, though, snow was falling the farther west she traveled, and the dress was becoming too cumbersome for her to wear, so she switched to a men's riding outfit, a far cry from what most considered appropriate dress for a lady at the time, but by now I think we all can agree that there was nothing typical about Annie. She
turned around after that and headed back east. Two months after reaching Chicago, she arrived in New York and boarded a steamship for Europe, where custom officials confiscated her bicycle and her money, and she was lambasted in the French press for her choice of clothing. But none of that deterred her. She got her bike back and returned to the road, cycling from Paris to Marseilles before boarding another ship to Japan. Only six months remained for her to
get back to Chicago and collect her winnings. Marche saw Annie's return to the United States. As she docked in San Francisco, California. She pedaled down through Los Angeles and the Southwest as she followed the Southern Pacific Railway tracks back to Chicago. She arrived there on September twelve, twelve days shy of her departure date the year before, she'd done it. After fifteen months of harsh roads, rain, snow,
and a few broken bones. Annie Londonderry had traveled around the world by bicycle and won the ten thousand dollar placed against her. An interesting note about Annie, though London Dairy was not her real last name, she was born Annie Cohen. You see, Annie had become a bit of
a celebrity before her trip even started. The idea alone was enough for companies to try and latch onto her attempt, and given the public perception of Jews at the time, it wouldn't have been safe for her to travel with her given surname Cohen, So she made a little deal with the London Dairy Lithia Springwater Company. She would temporarily change her last name to boost the company's visibility, and in return, she'd be able to travel without fear of persecution.
The best part of it all was the ten grand she'd won was really just icing on the cake. Annie had made more money from the corporate sponsorships and speaking engagements she'd picked up on her trip, establishing herself as an entrepreneur and one of the first true professional female athletes. Sure there's a lot to criticize about her journey. She certainly took a lot of steamships and trains, and there was no doubt there were better bicyclists out there. She
did just about what anyone could have done. She made the decision and she acted upon it. No Annie stood apart from everyone else because of something else. She, more than anyone else in her day, had the goal to follow Amelia Earhart's advice four decades before she spoke it. Annie had tenacity. People change over the course of their lives. As they grow up, they grow in other ways. Their taste change, their styles change, even the kinds of friends
they keep change. But most people tend not to change in other ways. Oh sure, they might get a drastic haircut or have a little work done, and some people might hit the gym five days a week so they can look like a superhero by beach season. But nobody changes the way Adam did. And that's because Adam was one of a kind. He was born in Austria at
the turn of the century. Ever the patriotic fellow, He attempted to enlist in the German army during World War One, but he was turned away, and for a very good reason. There was no way that they were going to allow a four ft six man on the front lines. They didn't even make uniforms in his size, but he kept trying. He felt he had a duty to serve his country, and he wouldn't let his diminutive stature hold him back. Adam managed to add another two inches to his frame
the following year. The army still wouldn't have it. He came in at under five feet tall, and to the powers that be, he proved to be more of a liability than an asset. Oddly enough, though, there were parts of Adam that had developed beyond his undersized build, namely his hands and his feet. He was like a massive puppy in that respect, with the shoes, eyes that had doubled within two years, even though his height remained mostly the same. When he reached the age of twenty one,
it was like a switch had been flipped. Adam shot up like a redwood, almost three feet in ten years. Doctors examined him thoroughly, discovering he was born with a condition known as acromegaly, in which the pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone. Even if you haven't heard of it,
there's no doubt you've seen it. The condition affects fewer than twenty thousand cases per year, but some notable individuals include celebrities like Andre the Giant from The Princess Bride and Richard Keel, who played the metal mouth henchman Jaws in several early James Bond movies. Adam's condition worsened later in life due to a tumor on his pituitary gland.
If you were to look at pictures of him from when he was barely twenty all the way to the end of his life, you'd see just how stark that transformation was. One moment, he's the picture of perfect health, all of his facial features within standard proportion. The next, his forehead has enlarged, as has his chin, and his cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk's. Within ten years, Adam had gone through a sort of jeckal and Hide
transformation into some one completely different. The doctors tried to operate and remove the tumor, but given how long he had been growing, chances of curing his condition were slim. They managed to slow down the growth rate, but unfortunately it wasn't enough. He kept getting taller, his body contorting and modulating to accommodate the rapid growth. He went blind in one eye and deaf in his left ear. His spine curve so severely he was bed ridden by his
late forties. Most people stopped growing by the time they reach adulthood, and might even begin shrinking as they approach old age, hunched over by years spent at a desk or performing manual labor, not atam. Though by the time he died at the age of fifty one, he'd grown from a meager four feet six inches of his youth was staggering seven ft eight inches tall. He had lived two lives as part of two different worlds, making Adam Rayner the only man on earth to have ever lived
as both a dwarf and a giant. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.