Annie Londonderry

Annie Cohen Kopchovsky was born in Latvia and emigrated with her family to Boston as a child, where she later married and had three young children. In 1894, according to her own later telling, a wager between two wealthy men over whether a woman could cycle around the world prompted her to leave her family behind for what was meant to be roughly fifteen months, setting off with barely any cycling experience and a bicycle she had to learn to ride properly along the way.

She adopted the name Annie Londonderry after a spring water company paid her to carry its advertising, part of a broader strategy of funding the journey almost entirely through sponsorship deals, paid lectures and the sale of photographs and souvenirs at each stop, rather than personal wealth, a genuinely inventive approach to financing travel at a time when few women travelled unaccompanied at all.

Her actual route mixed cycling with substantial travel by ship, and her public accounts of the journey changed considerably from stop to stop, often exaggerating danger or drama for the audiences paying to hear her speak, a habit that has made her a difficult figure for historians to pin down factually even as it made her a genuinely popular attraction in her own time.

She completed the journey in 1895, having crossed continents and generated international press coverage, and used it afterward to build a career as a journalist. Whatever the exact truth of her more colourful stories, her departure alone, leaving three young children in another adult's care to attempt something no woman had done, remains a striking act on its own.