William Lewis Sachtleben
1891, 21 April
William Sachtleben riding his bicycle along the banks of the Kizill river the day before he reached Kayseri, Turkey

Photographic b&w nitrate negative, Kodak, reversed
University of California (UCLA) - Library
Collection: Sachtleben (William Lewis) Papers. Collection 1841, Local identifier: uclamss_1841_0039
 
Photograph taken when William Sachtleben was travelling from Ankara to Kayseri. The latest Ankara photograph is dated April 14, 1891 and the earliest Kayseri photograph is dated April 22, 1891.
 
Photograph taken during William Lewis Sachtleben's stay in Athens before embarking on a bicycle journey across Asia with Thomas Gaskell Allen Jr.
 
William Lewis Sachtleben was an American long-distance cyclist who rode across Asia from Istanbul to Peking in 1891 to 1892 with Thomas Gaskell Allen Jr., his classmate from Washington University. Their journey had actually begun the day after they graduated from college, when they travelled to New York and on to Liverpool. In all they travelled 15,044 miles by bicycle, “the longest continuous land journey ever made around the world” as reported in their book Across Asia on a bicycle (1895). This collection consists of photographs taken in 1891 covering their winter stay in Athens and part of the journey that followed from Istanbul to Tashkent. The circular format photographs were taken with a Kodak box camera which was one of the first cameras available to amateur photographers (the Kodak, the No. 1, or the No. 2).
 
LL/131276