The oldest letter in a bottle is found on a beach in Western Australia by a couple, writes Guardian.
Tonya Ilman discovered the 132-year-old bottle of gin on the dunes near the island of Wagge in January 2018
Her husband, Kim Ilman, told the Australian edition of the Guardian that Tonya had originally considered the garbage can but eventually took it because it was different and fitting to the bookshelf of their home. She subsequently found a letter in German dated June 12, 1886. Authenticity was confirmed by the Western Australian Museum.
The bottle was thrown from the German Paula ship in 1886, which crossed the Indian Ocean, 950 kilometers from the Australian coast, according to Ross Anderson, a curator in the field of marine archeology at the Museum.
During this period, German ships conducted a 69-year experiment involving thousands of bottles in the ocean to track currents. So far 662 messages have been discovered. The last discovery was 1934.
Each message has the ship's coordinates, the date and the name of the ship, which helped Anderson confirm the message in the bottle.
The previous record for the oldest letter in a bottle is 108 !