So this is a really cool story. A Woman in Australia has found the oldest known message in a bottle in the world. Tonya Illman was on a beach in Western Australia, just north of Wedge Island when she discovered something sticking out of the sand. She picked up what looked like a “lovely old bottle” and then when a friend went to tip the sand out of the bottle, they discovered the note.
The message was dated June 12, 1886 and was thrown into the Indian Ocean from a German sailing boat which was going to Cardiff, Wales. There were thousands of such bottles thrown into oceans as part of a German experiment on global currents to help them find faster shipping routes, according to the Western Australia Museum. The Illmans brought the bottle to the museum and the finding was compared to the ship captain’s journal notes indicating they had thrown a bottle overboard. So far, 663 message slips have been recovered from that experiment but only one bottle – the one the Illmans brought in.
