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 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 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, 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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
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, written by Patti Rasmusen Breen. Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com, and it
is produced by Tyler Quaang. Four more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.