Century-Old Message in a Bottle Returned to Sender
A nearly 109-year-old bottle was part of a tradition of dropping objects and instruments into the sea to study ocean currents.
If you're ever marooned on a desert island, don't count on a message in a bottle to save you. That's because it can take over a hundred years for these objects to wash ashore, as a German woman recently discovered.
Marianne Winkler found an old bottle on a beach on Amrum Island, Germany earlier this year with a postcard from the early 1900s inside. Instructions printed on the card asked for its discoverer to mail it back to the Marine Biological Association (MBA) of the United Kingdom in the care of George Parker Bidder. The message promised a shilling in return.
"We haven't had [a bottle] returned in living memory," says Guy Baker, an MBA spokesperson. "So when this one turned
