Fishermen pull all kinds of things out of the ocean: gobs of garbage, ancient statues, wild-looking sea creatures, and a helluvalot more (like krakens and Nazi silver). But last month a Baltic Sea fisherman got a more subtle, and dare-we-say romantic surprise from the beautiful bowels of the ocean— he discovered what is thought to be the oldest retrieved message in a bottle.
In 1913 along Germany’s Baltic Coast, 20 year-old Richard Platz was struck by inspiration, penned a note onto a postcard, stuck it into a beer bottle and tossed the message into the sea.
It’s no small feat that the bottle survived the tumult of the sea intact, and that the cork seal was tight enough to preserve some of the writing from the water—including the author's address. From this information researchers were able to identify Platz, a baker’s son, member of a nature appreciation group and apparently a hopeless romantic.
A Berlin-based genealogical researcher then located Platz’s 62 year-old granddaughter. She never had the chance to meet her grandfather, who died in 1946 at age 54, but when she visited the museum holding the ocean treasure she was moved: “Tears rolled down my cheeks,” she said.
So what insight did Platz have to share with the rest of us? No one is sure just yet—the passage of time and moisture rendered much of the writing illegible. But experts plan on soon trying to decipher what we can only hope are some straight-forward answers to the myriad mysteries of the universe. (Or maybe it was his SOS to the world.)
Image: commons.wikimedia.org.
