One of Bidder's original bottles, along with his notes. Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom
George Parker Bidder may not be a household name, but he's getting some
modern-day recognition for a series of experiments performed between
1904 and 1906 in the UK.
He
set 1,020 bottles stuffed with postcards out into the North Sea between
the UK and Norway and tracked the responses to learn more about ocean
patterns.
All these years later, one of Bidder's bottles rolled onto shore at the
island of Amrum in Germany. The couple that discovered it, Marianne and
Horst Winkler, had to break the bottle to get at the message inside. It
instructed them to to send the postcard back to the
Marine Biological Association of the UK in exchange for a shilling reward.
The Marine Biological Association -- Bidder was its president from
1939-1945 -- is still around and was thrilled to receive the postcard.
The organization kept its end of the bargain and sent the couple an old
English shilling in return. Shillings are no longer in circulation as
currency in the UK, so the Winklers now have a coin worthy of being in a
collection.
Guinness World Records has been asked to confirm the note as the oldest message in a bottle ever found,
according to The Independent. The
current record holder
was found in 2013 and spent over 99 years in the water. That bottle,
too, was used as part of an experiment to chart water currents.
The
Marine Biological Association shared the history of Bidders's bottles
and how he used them to track bottom water movement. The bottles were
designed to be caught in trawling fishing nets. His reports show that
the sealed glass capsules "were trawled up by the fishermen at the rate
of 55% per annum." That means quite a few bottles slipped through the
nets. The postcards inside asked the finders to report the location of
where they were found.
"Bidder's experiment revealed a number of interesting results, one
being that it confirmed the view of naturalists who supposed that bottom
feeders tend to move against the current," the association notes.
The most popular image of a message in a bottle is as a romantic
notion, a note about love or connection tucked inside. Bidder's
bottles-for-science show another side to the phenomenon, one of
discovery and ingenuity and how an experiment from the past can still
resonate today.
