World’s Oldest Message-in-a-Bottle

September 5, 2012

A Scottish fisherman has found the world’s oldest message in a bottle, the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed last week. It is 98 years old, and was cast into the ocean by Captain C. Hunter Brown, a scientist at the Glasgow School of Navigation, who was studying the currents in the North Sea.

The bottle was one of 1,890 bottles released on June 10, 1914, and the 315th to be entered into Captain Brown’s log, which is still kept and updated by Marine Scotland Science in Aberdeen.

That is so cool: a 100-year-old experiment still ongoing! (We’ve got to do an article on the world’s longest-running experiments, don’t we?) Do check out that Atlantic article: it has a ton of info on that experiment, and others like it.

Here’s a pic of the postcard:

Too cool.

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We’ve written about message-in-a-bottle stories a couple times over the years. If you’ve got Uncle John’s Top Secret Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!—look on page 106!