A 108-year-old Message in a Bottle
On November 30, 1906, George Bidder dropped a bottle from a boat into the North Sea. The weighted glass bottle sank almost to the sea floor, and then it move slowly for 108 years and 138 days.
Its journey ended when Marianne Winkler found the bottle in 2015. Winkler was then on vacation on Amrum Island. She picked up the bottle when it was washed up onto the beach. She saw a piece of paper inside, but didn't break it open. She could tell that the bottle was old. So she didn't want to damage it.
Finally she got the piece of paper out of the bottle. She found that the paper was actually a postcard. On the back of the card there was this message: The Marine Biological Association（海洋生物学协会） would pay a shilling（先令） for the bottle. A shilling was a unit of money that was used in Great Britain before the early 1970s.
Winkler filled out the card and posted it. The association was surprised to get a postcard addressed to George Bidder, the president of the association from 1939 to 1945. The workers of the association searched on the Internet to find a shilling. They found one and sent it to Winkler as a reward.
The message in the bottle was the oldest ever re-discovered. For this reason Marianne Winkler got a place in “Guinness World Records”（吉尼斯世界纪录）. She broke the record for the oldest message in a bottle.
Winkler's bottle was not the only one Bidder sent to sea. Between 1904 and 1906, he spent away more than one thousand bottles. He placed postcards inside them. The bottles were part of a research project to map currents（洋流） in the North Sea. This was the best method at that time. But whether the association could get the bottles back depended on the people who found them. The association reported that about 55 percent of the bottles were returned. They added that the experiment was a success as it showed the east-to-west flow of the North Sea's currents.
