Last month a group of fisherman found a floating bottle in the ocean and pulled in onboard their ship. At first the bottle just looked like a piece of trash but when the fisherman examined it closer they noticed that it had a message inside it. The message was written in 1913 by 20-year-old Richard Platz.

Platz had been taking a walk along Germany’s Baltic Coast when he decided to put the postcard in a beer bottle and toss it into the ocean. The bottle has been at sea ever since and nobody will ever know exactly where it traveled before it was found by the fishermen.

The writing on the postcard inside the bottle is illegible, but the date reads May 17, 1913. The message in a bottle could be the oldest one ever found. It was returned to Platz’s 62-year-old granddaughter, Angela Erdmann, in Berlin.

Erdmann had never met her grandfather but was excited to see the bottle and learn the story behind it. Platz died at the age of 54 and Erdmann said that the message inspired her to start doing some genealogy work to find out more about her grandfather and her family.

The bottle and the message will be on display at the International Maritime Museum until May 1st. Experts plan to decipher the message on the postcard and hopefully deliver it to its intended recipient if that person is still alive. Erdmann is excited to find out what the message says and who it was intended for as well.

A message in a bottle that was found in 2012 held the previous record as oldest message in a bottle and had been at sea for over 98 years. It dated back to 1914. The recent bottle found is a little more than a year older and will become the new record holder.

What do you think the message could say?

Image via Wikimedia Commons