Message in a bottle

With a growing awareness that bottles constitute waste that can harm the environment and marine life, environmentalists tend to favor biodegradable drift cards[3] and wooden blocks.

[7] The Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike records the story of an exiled poet who, in about 1177 A.D., launched wooden planks on which he had inscribed poems describing his plight.

[11] Scientific experiments involving drift objects—more generally called determinate drifters[12]—provide information about currents and help researchers develop ocean circulation maps.

[3] Using a network of beachcomber informants, rear admiral Alexander Becher is believed to be the first (from 1808–1852) to study travel of so-called "bottle papers" around an ocean gyre (a large circulating current system).

[11] In the late 1800s, Albert I, Prince of Monaco determined that the Gulf Stream branched into the North Atlantic Drift and the Azores Current.

[14] In the 1890s, Scottish scientist T. Wemyss Fulton released floating bottles and wooden slips to chart North Sea surface currents for the first time.

[18] Drift bottle studies have provided a simple way to learn about non-tidal movement of waters containing eggs and larvae of commercially important fishes, for sharing among fisheries scientists and oceanographers.

[13] Wooden blocks float higher in the water and thus are more influenced by wind—a design specially suited for simulating travel paths of plastic waste that is less dense than glass containers.

[2] A Scripps scientist said that marine organisms grow on the bottles, causing them to sink within eight to ten months unless washed ashore earlier.

[35] Historical examples are listed in chronological order, based on year of recovery (when applicable): The notion of the message in a bottle has come to attain a kind of romanticism, built perhaps on the allure of the exotic mystery its contents might reveal from a faraway place or a long-ago time.

[89] However, intense media attention over a personal relationship that resulted from one woman's find, is said to have caused her to remark that had she known what would happen, she would have left the bottle on the beach.

[69] Another woman said she initially felt shocked and violated by publication of the personal suffering she had expressed in a bottled letter that she never expected would be found or read.

[120] A geologist left a bottled message in 1959 in a cairn on isolated Ward Hunt Island (Canada, 83°N latitude), allowing its finders in 2013 to determine that a nearby glacier had retreated over 200 feet in the intervening 54 years.

[158] Prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp concealed bottles containing sketches[159] and writings[125] that were found after World War II.

This bottle and its contents (sample postcard and insert shown above) were launched in 1959 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and were found in 2013. [ 1 ]
This late-1700s ocean circulation map was based on the work of Benjamin Franklin and James Poupard after conducting drift bottle experiments, apparently still unaware of the Gulf Stream 's origin in the Gulf of Mexico . [ 3 ]
This romanticized Édouard Riou drawing of a message in a bottle was included in Jules Verne 's 1860s book In Search of the Castaways . [ 5 ]
Some bottled messages have been placed on land rather than in a body of water. This 1892 quill-and-ink commemoration of Scottish lighthouse engineers was discovered in the walls of a Scottish lighthouse in 2024. [ 46 ]
A man launches a " St Kilda mailboat" from the isolated island about 110 miles (180 km) northwest of the Scottish mainland, ca. 1898. [ 47 ] Usually formed of sheepskin bladders providing flotation for boat-shaped enclosures for letters, the "mailboats" reached Scotland with some degree of reliability, and also to Scandinavia. [ 47 ]
This postcard, inserted into a bottle launched by the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. circa 1906, was found in 2015. [ 16 ]
This bottled message, released June 12, 1886, from a German sailing vessel in the Indian Ocean as part of a drift bottle study, was found on a beach in Western Australia in 2018. [ 94 ]