The world's oldest shipment found its recipient almost a century later (7 photos)

"Why not?" The guy swung his hand and threw a bottle into the cold waters of the Baltic Sea.





Inside the beer container, the 20-year-old son of a baker placed two stamps and a postcard on which he indicated his details, Berlin address and a request to return the find if it was found. The departure was dated May 17, 1913.



Fisher with his find

In the early spring of 2014, a resident of the city of Kiel, Konrad Fischer, went fishing. And along with the usual catch, the man also came across an unusual one - a tightly sealed bottle. The fisherman uncorked the find and found inside two stamps and a fairly rotten old postcard. The edges of the paper had rotted and the ink had smudged, but the man managed to read the sender’s name, who turned out to be Richard Platz, and the address.





The message was looking for an addressee for almost 100 years

Enthusiasts got involved. They managed to find a relative of the sender, who turned out to be Platz’s granddaughter, 62-year-old Berlin resident Angela Erdman. The woman was deeply touched by a message from an ancestor whom she did not find alive - her grandfather died in the 40s, before his 55th birthday.

For some time, the wanderer find, which survived several wars, the birth and death of states, was part of the exhibition of the Hamburg Museum. Where anyone could admire the traveler.



The chances that the bottle could, in principle, “survive” in the harsh elements of the sea were close to zero. After all, she had to face storms, rocks and animals. But a simple miracle happened.



Theophrastus

According to legend, the practice of bottle mail was introduced by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. It says that in 310 BC. e. he threw several tightly sealed vessels into the waters beyond Gibraltar to prove the flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. A few months later, one of them was found in Sicily.



Responsible position

In Britain, until the beginning of the 18th century, there was a law according to which breaking such bottles and reading messages was prohibited under penalty of death. This could only be done by a representative of the authorities, for which a special position was established at court - the uncorker of ocean bottles.



Have you ever sent or found a letter in a bottle?