THE ROUND-THE-WORLD CYCLIST Annie Londonderry

A “cabinet card” of Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, known as Annie Londonderry.

In 1895, Annie Cohen embarked on a quest to become the first woman ever to cycle around the world. Did she make it? Yes! Were the newspapers engrossed in her story? Yes! Did she actually… um, cycle? Sometimes!

By sheer grit, Annie made her life into something (literally) unbelievable. Peter Zheutlin, author of two books about Annie, shares the tale of a woman who “didn’t run away to join the circus; she became the circus.”

Annie Londonderry was given an obituary as part of the New York Times’ “Overlooked” series.

Newsreel and newspaper footage read by James Henderson, Marc Nelson, and Sam Henderson.

All images courtesy of Peter Zheutlin unless otherwise indicated.

Portrait of Annie London taken in Chicago at the end of her journey.derry

Annie as she was depicted in two cycling periodicals, The Bearings and Cycling Life, in October 1894, after acquiring her Sterling bicycle

Map of Annie Londonderry’s travels
created by Mera MacKendrick

Annie as depicted in an illustration that accompanied her first-person account of her trip published in the New York World on October 20, 1895.

Annie was a consummate self-promoter and an inveterate storyteller. She staged this photograph near San Francisco in the spring of 1895. It was among the lantern slides she used to illustrate lectures she gave across the American west in 1895 to earn money, lectures filled with fantastic tales of danger and high adventure.

This photograph of Annie’s bike was taken in San Francisco in early spring 1895.

This advertisement for the Londonderry Lithia Springs Water Company appeared in the Rocky Mountain News of Denver on August 12, 1895. The company, based in Nashua, N.H., paid Annie to hang an advertising placard on her bike and to assume the “Londonderry” name.

The images in the lantern slides Annie collected and used to illustrate her lectures were often exquisite. That these fragile glass slides survived multiple shipments by ship and train during the course of Annie’s trip is remarkable. That they were found intact more than 100 years later seemed equally remarkable.

A woman cyclist in her bloomer outfit, leaving her beleaguered husband in charge of her children. People genuinely feared this ‘New Woman’.
From Puck magazine, 7 July 1897

Peter Zheutlin is a freelance journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Parade Magazine, AARP Magazine and numerous other publications. He’s the author of the New York Times best-seller, Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs, and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway and Rescued: What Second-Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living With Purpose, Loving With Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things and The Dog Went Over the Mountain: Travels with Albie: An American Journey. He’s also the co-author, with his wife Judith Gelman, of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars and Restaurant, of Mad Men and The Unofficial Girls Guide to New York: Inside the Cafes, Clubs, and Neighborhoods of HBO’s Girls.

He previously practiced law and taught legal research and writing at the Northwestern University School of Law and the University of Virginia Law School, workeas the Public Affairs Director of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, and was privileged to be part of the IPPNW delegation that traveled to Oslo to receive the prize.

THE ROUND-THE-WORLD CYCLIST Annie Londonderry

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