Dropped into the Atlantic Ocean’s North Sea on June 10, 1914, this is the oldest message in a bottle ever found. A fellow plucked it from the sea last year. The bottle was part of a study of ocean currents conducted by the Glasgow School of Navigation nearly a century ago. From National Geographic:
According to (Marine Scotland Science’s Bill) Turrell, Leaper’s discovery — plucked just 9 miles (15 kilometers) from where (Captain C. Hunter) Brown released it — is the 315th bottle recovered from that experiment. Each one, Turrell explained, was “specially weighted to bob along the seabed,” hopefully to be scooped up by a trawler or to eventually wash up on shore. Turrell’s Aberdeen-based government agency still keeps and updates Captain Brown’s log. Oddly enough, the previous record—a message in a bottle dating to 1917—was set in 2006 by Mark Anderson, a friend of Leaper’s who was sailing the same ship, the Copious. “It was an amazing coincidence,” Leaper said in a statement. “It’s like winning the lottery twice.”
