The Oldest Message In A Bottle Ever Has Been Found

Did you know about this?

Now this is something you don’t hear everyday. Messages in a bottle have long been written about in novels and stories, of course before there were telephone wires, morse code and the like. However common or rare they were, indeed some people used the technique (or attempted to). This is pretty cool as they found a 100 year old message in a bottle:

A postcard placed in a bottle and thrown into the North Sea more than a century ago has been found and returned to the scientific institution responsible for its distribution. Rather than a love letter or an SOS to the world, it is part of one of the longest running scientific experiments in the world.

From 1904-1906 George Parker Bidder of the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. (MBA) placed 1020 postcards addressed to the institution in bottles and had them released into the North Sea. The cards offered a reward of a shilling to anyone who found one and posted it back with information.

The earliest known message in a bottle actually occured in 310 B.C.

Sent by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s pupils, as a way of testing his hypothesis that the Atlantic Ocean flows into the Mediterranean Sea.

(Statue of Aristotle)

Another interesting occurance was in 1846:
The United States Coast & Geodetic Survey begins releasing messages in bottles into the ocean en masse to gather data on ocean currents

This person discovered the bottle earlier in 2015:

Marianne Winkler found the bottle in April on a beach on Amrum, an island off Germany’s North Sea coast. Winkler told local website Amrun News, “It’s always a joy finding a message-in-a-bottle on the beach. Where does it come from, who wrote it and how long has it been travelling with the wind, waves and currents?”

What would you do if you found this kind of message? Would you donate it to a museum, keep it as an artifact or sell it on ebay? 😉