A few months back, Marianne Winkler found a bottle on a German beach with a message inside requesting its return to the Marine Biological Association (MBA) that had dropped more than 1,000 bottles into the North Sea as part of a study of currents. Thing is, that experiment took place more than a century ago. From National Geographic:
“We haven’t had [a bottle] returned in living memory,” says Guy Baker, an MBA spokesperson.(Former MBA president and lead researcher on the bottle study George Parker) Bidder got about half of his messages back, says Baker. And the longest it took for one of his bottles to come home—before this current one—was about four years….
Bidder’s bottle has also been submitted to the Guinness World Records for consideration as the oldest message in a bottle ever recovered. The current record-holder is a 99-year-old bottle discovered in a fishing net off the Shetland Islands in 2013.
“Century-Old Message in a Bottle Returned to Sender”