Discover the message in the world's oldest bottle

The message contained in a bottle of gin was thrown into the sea from a German ship in 1886 and found 132 years later on the Australian beach.

Tonya Illman found a 132-year-old bottle of wine near Wedge Island in January. Her husband, Kym Illman, said she initially thought it was garbage but still picked it up by the bottle with embossed and different letters will help their bookshelves. looks better.

Illman saw in a bottle a roll of paper printed in German, dated June 12, 1886. The Western Australian Museum then checked and certified the date of this scroll.

"That's really lucky. Nothing could be better," Guardian said Kym Illman.

A bottle of gin was discovered on a beach in Western Australia.(Photo: Kym Illman / Guardian).

According to Ross Anderson, the Western Australian museum's maritime archaeologist, the bottle was thrown from the German sailboat named Paula in 1886 when it passed through the Indian Ocean, 950km from the Australian coast.

At that time, German boats were conducting tests that lasted 69 years from 1864 to 1933, including activities to throw thousands of bottles into the sea to track ocean currents.

Each scroll in the bottle records the coordinates of the ship, the date and the name of the ship. Information from the scroll that the Illman couple found fit the maritime profile of the sailboat Paula and Anderson also compared the handwriting. on the scroll with the captain's letter in the log.

"Unexpectedly, there was a captain's note on June 12, 1886 about a bottle thrown into the sea," Anderson said.

His findings were verified by experts from the German Naval Observatory. The record for the oldest message in the bottle was 108 years ago.

The message in the world's oldest bottle is part of the German cross-century experiment.(Photo: Kym Illman / Guardian).

Kym Illman said that after being brought back, the wet ancient scroll was put in the oven for 5 minutes to dry."I have a basic understanding of German and this piece of paper would ask the visitor to record the coordinates and dates to pick up the bottle and then return it to the ship ," he said.

Of the thousands of bottles that were thrown into the sea during a German experiment, 662 other messages were found and returned, the last since 1934.