Marine Researchers In UK Given A Century Old Bottle With A Message

Marianne Winkler and her husband were indeed rewarded the old English shilling promised in the message after sending the postcard to its rightful recipients. The message is asking anybody who finds it to return it to the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in Plymouth, United Kingdom.

The MBA is waiting on an official announcement from the Guinness World Records whether the message in a bottle will go down in the history as the oldest.

Mr Bidder, the former president of the association, had released the bottle as part of research into deep sea currents in the early 1900s that would be valuable to commercial fisherman. The paper inside clearly read “break the bottle” and after having no luck taking it out carefully the two made a decision to do as the bottle said and break it open. Marianne Winkler’s feelings were much more powerful when she first spotted the bottle on the German beach of Amrum. Inside the bottle, the couple said they found a postcard requesting to be delivered to the Marine Biological Association of the UK.

Message in a bottle became popular for people making wishes, throwing their deepest and unrealistic dreams to the ocean, and some wishing for a miracle to happen when the bottle gets back to shore.

Meanwhile, Bidder’s message-in-a-bottle experiment proved that ocean currents move from east to west in the North Sea.

A message in a bottle recently discovered on Amrum island in Germany could be the oldest one ever found. But in the meantime, the Winklers say the organization has fulfilled its promise: they’ve received their reward of one shilling. The current record is held by a message that was sent 99 years and 43 days ago. The organization also asked that the person who found the bottle to include information about when and where they discovered it. Most letters have been returned to the association in the following months; some of them have never been found again, which is why researchers have been very surprised to see this new message resurface again after so many years. But this bottle is at least 108 years old making it the new title holder.