MEXICO: When British scientist George Parker Bidder started tossing glass bottles into the North Sea in 1904 he wasn’t sending an SOS to the world. Nor did they contain love letters.
But he was hoping someone would find his message in a bottle, which carried instructions to send word back to his research institute, the Marine Biological Association of Britain.
More than a century later, one of these relics has been discovered on the beach of a small German island, Amrum.
Although it is yet to be confirmed, the missive is likely the world’s oldest surviving message in a bottle. According to the Guinness World Records, the current oldest message in a bottle is 99 years old and was discovered west of the Shetland Islands in 2013, although there are reports of older bottles.
The woman who discovered the bottle on Amrum, Marianne Winkler, followed the enclosed postcard’s instructions to break it open. On the card, written in English, German and Dutch, the bottle’s finder is asked to post it back to the MBA with the promise of a one shilling reward.
Between 1904 and 1906 Dr Bidder, a marine biologist, released more than 1000 bottles with messages into the North Sea to study the flow of the currents. He weighted the bottles to float just above the sea bed because he was interested in deep sea currents rather than surface movements.
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