Sending a quick message to someone on Instagram may be a more effective way to communicate in the modern age, but there's something to be said about a much older method of messaging that's been one of the most popular for a long time: It's nothing but a good old message in a bottle — the oldest piece of which has survived for an impressively long time.
In 2018, on a beach off North Wedge Island in Australia, Tonya Illman found a mysterious 132-year-old message in a bottle.
“It looked like a beautiful old bottle, so I picked it up because I thought it would look good on my bookshelf,” Elman said in a statement at the time. “It was my son’s girlfriend who discovered the note when she went to pour sand out of the bottle. The paper was wet, tightly rolled up and tied with string. We took it home, dried it off, and when we opened it, we saw that it was printed in German, in very faint German script.”
Elman and her husband do some business online. After investigation They suspected that the discovery may have been part of a 69-year-old experiment conducted by the German Naval Observatory to study ocean surface currents.
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The notes in the bottles included the date of the launch, the coordinates where it occurred, the name of the ship and its course, and a request on the back that whoever finds the bottle should return it to the German Naval Observatory or the German Consulate, and an explanation of when and where it was found.
Details of the note found by Ellman indicate that the bottle was on a ship travelling from Cardiff, Wales to Makassar, Indonesia in 1886. After an examination by experts from the modern branches of the Western Australian Museum and the German Naval Observatory – which included dating the paper and comparing the handwriting – the find was declared the oldest message in a bottle ever found.
“Incredibly, during archival research in Germany, we found Paula’s original weather log, and on her entry on 12 June 1886, the captain threw a floating bottle overboard,” said Dr Ross Anderson, Assistant Curator of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Museum. “The date and coordinates match exactly the information in the message in the bottle.”
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However, there are a few new contenders who could take the crown of the 132-year-old message.
Plumber under floorboards of a house in Scotland in 2022 Find outWhich is supposed to be a message sealed in a bottle that is 135 years old. The message in a watercolor bottle that was recently discovered on a New Jersey beach may be even older.
In either case, the age of the notes has not yet been confirmed, so the 132-year-old German discovery is considered the oldest such message.
source: iflscience.com
