There’s something romantic about the idea of receiving a message in a bottle. Imagine, mindlessly walking along Clifton and you trip over a glass bottle. Being the conscious environmentalist and foreseeing the disaster of broken glass, you pull the half buried bottle up out of the sand with the intention of throwing it away. As it emerges, you’re struck by a piece of paper that seems to be trapped inside it. And so the story goes on…

That’s pretty much what happened to Mrs Winkler when she stumbled upon a message in a bottle in Amrum, in the German North Sea, while on holiday in April.

Written on a piece of paper inside were the words “Break the bottle”. “My husband, Horst, carefully tried to get the message out of the bottle, but there was no chance, so we had to do as it said,” Mrs Winkler said. Inside they found a postcard with no date but a message promising a reward of a shilling to anyone who returned it. The message, in English, German and Dutch, asked anyone who discovered the bottle to fill in some information on where and how they found it.

The return address was the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. Doing what the message requested, the couple sent the postcard to the address and waited to hear a response to figure out what was going on.

“It was quite a stir when we opened that envelope, as you can imagine,” Guy Baker, communications director at the Marine Biological Association, said.

Apparently, the bottle was one of 1020 released into the North Sea as a part of a project to find out about deep sea currents and fish. Released from Plymouth between 1904 and 1906, the bottles were specially designed to float just above the sea bed, allowing them to be carried by the currents deep below the surface.

Unlike today’s technology that allows one to track the effects of currents with electronic tags, the bottles were released with the instructions so as to gather as much information as possible. Most were returned within a couple of months – not decades – and the information provided was able to help George Parker Bidder theorise about various activities – he discovered that plaice generally swim against the deep currents and the deep sea current flowed from east to west in the North Sea.

At an estimated 108 years old (thought to be released with the 1906 batch) this message-in-a-bottle could be the oldest ever found. But to top it off, Mrs Winkler got the shilling reward promised in the note:

“We found an old shilling, I think we got it on eBay,” said Mr Baker. “We sent it to her with a letter saying ‘Thank you’.”

[source: telegraph]