The 1920s was a decade made for explorers and adventurers. After the horrors of the Great War, the world needed heroes as it entered a glamorous new age – and it found them in the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Percy Fawcett, George Mallory and Amelia Earhart, whose exploits remain vivid more than 100 years later.
But one such hero has faded from memory: Gertrude Ederle (pronounced ‘Ed-er-ly’), a shy 19-year-old New Yorker who was the most famous woman in the world in the summer of 1926.
