Around The World
The Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company paid her $100 to carry its placard on her bike and also contracted with her to adopt its name. Travelling with a change of clothes and a pearl-handled revolver, Londonderry earned her way by turning her bicycle and body into a billboard, carrying advertising banners and ribbons through cities around the world. She was a remarkable sight to Victorian eyes.
Her ride was described by the New York World on October 20, 1895, as “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.” Londonderry claimed that it was set in motion by a novel wager by two club members in Boston - a claim made by other travelers during the "round the world" fad. Londonderry’s challenge was to circle the globe by bicycle in 15 months and to earn $5,000 . The venture was a test of a woman’s ability to fend for herself. Despite having never ridden a bicycle, she pedalled out of Boston leaving her husband and young children .
Having travelled from New York to Chicago, she exchanged her skirts for bloomers, and her woman's 42-pound Columbia bicycle for a 21-pound men's Sterling. Possibly due to the winter, she switched her route from west to east and headed to Europe via New York City. She arrived in Le Havre, France on December 3, 1894. Despite bureaucratic difficulties, Londonderry said her trip through France was the highlight of her experience. She made Paris to Marseilles in two weeks to public acclaim. She steamed across the Mediterranean to Egypt, making short tours throughout Egypt, Jerusalem and modern-day Yemen, before sailing to Colombo and Singapore.
Returning to the United States at San Francisco on March 23, 1895 she cycled to Los Angeles, then El Paso, and north to Denver where she arrived on August 12, 1895. Along the way, she regaled audiences with fanciful tales of her journey, and seemed to thrive in the lime-light. She arrived in Boston on September 24, 15 months after she had left. Despite criticism that she traveled more "with" a bicycle than on one, she proved a formidable cyclist at impromptu local races en route across America.
Read more about this topic: Annie Londonderry
Famous quotes containing the words the world and/or world:
“Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)