by Peter Zheutlin, Citadel Press, 2007, 224 pages

It has all the elements of a tall tale: Two wealthy, Boston sugar merchants make a high-stakes, $10,000 bet, challenging an inexperienced young woman to ride a bicycle around the globe, starting with nothing but the clothes on her back. The cyclist is also tasked with earning $5,000, without accepting any charity, before returning to Boston in 15 months or less.

On June 27, 1894, a young Jewish housewife left Boston’s West End tenements in an attempt to become the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world. It was the first bicycle Annie Londonderry had ever owned—a 42-pound Columbia. She wore cumbersome long skirts, which were the accepted women’s clothing of the time, and carried nothing else with her. A new book by author Peter Zheutlin documents Londonderry’s historic adventure.

The 1890s was a decade of modernization and globalization. The entire world was getting smaller and more accessible, and the bicycle was a vehicle for the masses. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in history.”

The bicycle was a metaphor for personal freedom. Women could not get driver’s licenses, but on bicycles, they could become equals or superiors of men. As Annie Kopchovsky rolled over gravel and sand roads, she shed her constraints and became Annie Londonderry (renamed for her sponsorship by Londonderry, N.H.’s Lithia Springs).

Zheutlin spent a decade meticulously researching her ride. From newspaper reports on her stops in places ranging from the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to the streets of Shanghai, he not only gleaned mountains of information about Annie, he illuminated the feeling of a bygone era and what it must have felt like to live in places like the thriving frontier town of El Paso. After he began researching this book, Zheutlin discovered that he is actually Annie Kopchovsky’s great grandnephew. And, with lots of research and a little bit of luck, he found Annie’s granddaughter, Mary, her only living descendant and his cousin. He came across a box in Mary’s basement containing the original lantern slides Annie amassed during her journey, which she used as she lectured to try to earn enough money to win her bet. Now, after more than a century of obscurity, Annie has come roaring back to life.

Annie was a larger-than-life character trapped in the body of a woman who lived in an era that put little stock in women who yearned for anything outside normal Victorian trappings. She was a shameless self-promoter who never bothered with little things like facts when they didn’t support her cause. She loved to tell tall tales. After telling one reporter an elaborate story of being run off the road by a car in California, she turned around and told a competing paper a completely different account of the incident. She had supporters and detractors everywhere she went, and the records from small towns across America and beyond show that she left a serious wake as she pedaled around the world. That was fine with Annie. Good press or bad, it all suited her needs. In a time when outlaws like John Wesley Hardin could sit in the audience in El Paso and listen to her lecture, Annie became another tall tale, and one of the biggest news stories of her day. —Josh Pierce

Author Peter Zheutlin will offer a presentation about Annie Londonderry at Papa Wheelies Bicycle Shop at 653 Islington St. in Portsmouth on Wednesday, May 7 at 6:30 p.m. He will show the original glass lantern slides Annie amassed during her trip around the world more than 100 years ago.