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Message in bottle arrives after 101 years

A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago and believed to be the world's oldest has been presented to the sender's granddaughter, a German museum said on Monday.

A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic off the northern city of Kiel last month, said Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg, theguardian.com reported.

"This is certainly the first time such an old message in a bottle was found, particularly with the bottle intact," he reportedly said.

Researchers then set to work identifying the author and managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives in Berlin. "It was almost unbelievable," Erdmann reportedly told the German news agency DPA.

She was first able to hold the brown bottle last week at the Hamburg museum. Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder return it to the writer's home address in Berlin, the report said.

"That was a pretty moving moment," Erdmann said. "Tears rolled down my cheeks."

Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to determine based on the address that it was 20-year-old baker's son Richard Platz who threw the bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913, according to the report.




 

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