Dropping someone a quick DM on Instagram might be a much more efficient way to communicate in the modern day, but there’s something to be said about the longevity of much older ways of sending a message, none more so than a good ol’ message in a bottle – of which the oldest ever found has stuck around for an impressively long time.
Back in 2018, on a beach just north of Wedge Island in Australia, Tonya Illman stumbled upon what later turned out to be a 132-year-old message in a bottle.
“It just looked like a lovely old bottle so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase,” said Illman in a statement made at the time. “My son’s girlfriend was the one who discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out. The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting on it.”
After some online investigations by Illman and her husband, they suspected that the find could have been part of a 69-year-long drift bottle experiment – an experiment used to study ocean surface currents – conducted by the German Naval Observatory.
Notes placed in these bottles had details of the date they were thrown overboard, the coordinates where that took place, the name and route of the ship, and overleaf, a request to whoever found the bottle to return it, with details of when and where it was found, to the German Naval Observatory or a German consulate.
Details on the note found by Illman suggested that the bottle had been on a ship sailing from Cardiff, Wales, to Makassar, Indonesia back in 1886. After inspection from experts – which included dating the paper and handwriting comparisons – at the Western Australian Museum and modern-day offshoots of the German Naval Observatory, the find was confirmed as the oldest message in a bottle ever found.
“Incredibly, an archival search in Germany found Paula’s original Meteorological Journal and there was an entry for 12 June 1886 made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard,” said Dr Ross Anderson, Assistant Curator Maritime Archaeology at the WA Museum. “The date and the coordinates correspond exactly with those on the bottle message.”
However, there are a couple of more recent contenders that could be coming for the 132-year-old message’s crown.
Found beneath the rather less sandy floorboards of a house in Scotland in 2022, a plumber uncovered what’s believed to be a 135-year-old message in a bottle. Older still may be a note within an aqua-colored bottle recently discovered on a beach in New Jersey.
In both cases, confirmation of the notes’ ages is yet to come, so for the moment at least, a bottle from an experiment still pumping out results over 130 years later still reigns champion.
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