In 1894 a poor Latvian immigrant mother of three left the Massachusetts State House on a bicycle she had learned to ride only days earlier, carrying a change of clothes and a pearl-handled pistol. Her goal was to cycle around the world in fifteen months, and she manipulated the media into making her a sensation.

This episode reconstructs how Annie Cohen Kopchowsky used her ad-sales instincts to secure corporate sponsorship, reinvent herself as Annie Londonderry, and blur the line between endurance feat and elaborate marketing spectacle.

• The likely fabricated wager and the bicycle industry behind it
• Abandoning Victorian corsets and skirts to embrace the new woman look
• The loophole that let her cruise through Asia by steamship
• Selling autographs, lectures, and wildly exaggerated tall tales
• Her later  ...