101-Year-Old Message In A Bottle Likely World’s Oldest

German fisherman Konrad Fischer, who has the correct name for his line or work, is seen holding the bottle from 1913.

A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic off the northern city of Kiel last month, said Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg.

“This is certainly the first time such an old message in a bottle was found, particularly with the bottle intact,” he said.

Researchers then set to work identifying the author and managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives in Berlin. “It was almost unbelievable,” Erdmann told the German news agency DPA.

She was first able to hold the brown bottle last week at the Hamburg museum. Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder return it to the writer’s home address in Berlin.

“That was a pretty moving moment,” Erdmann said. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.”

 

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.