On June 25, 1894, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a young mother of three small children, stood before a crowd of 500 friends, family, suffragists and curious onlookers at the Massachusetts State House. Then, declaring she would circle the world, she climbed onto a 42-pound Columbia bicycle and “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street.”
Fifteen months later one New York newspaper called it “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.”
The trip was reportedly set in motion by a wager #Quotes