The world’s oldest message in a bottle was pulled out of the sea by a fisherman in April 2014. The brown beer bottle was found in the Baltic Sea near the city of Kiel, Germany. Inside the bottle was a postcard with a message asking the finder to return the postcard to the bottle owner in Berlin. The International Maritime Museum traced the bottle to then 20-year-old Richard Platz, who threw it into the water in 1913. The bottle was then shown to Platz’s 62-year-old granddaughter and is now being studied to see if the rest of the postcard can be deciphered. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest message in a bottle was dated 1914 and had been in the water for nearly 98 years.

Photo credit: Internationales Maritimes Museum Hamburg Germany