Message in a bottle

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Message in a bottle

A message in a bottle is an empty bottle or other buoyant vessel that is filled with a document and possibly other smaller objects, in order to be thrown into a body of water (usually a river or an ocean ) - sealed watertight . The transmitter hopes that the current will wash the message ashore at another location, where it can then be discovered by a finder.

use

Message in a bottle ( Hurtigruten , 2011)

The vernacular associates messages in a bottle with calls for help from shipwrecked people who have no other option to seek rescue.

Allegedly, Christopher Columbus already made use of a kind of message in a bottle on his journey west in 1493 by handing a cedar keg with messages for the Catholic King ( Ferdinand II and his wife Isabella I ) to the waves during a heavy storm . However, this mail did not reach the recipient.

In earlier times, the message in a bottle found with a request for help was handed over to the local authorities, who forwarded the document to the responsible consul in the country. On long voyages z. E.g. letters from emigrants to those who stayed at home with money for postage were put in a bottle in the sea in the hope that the message will be found and the finder will forward it to the addressees by post.

Bottle posts are also used as a means of transport by residents of lonely islands. For example, this is known in the Westman Islands , which are off the south coast of Iceland . If the inhabitants of these islands wanted to send letters to friends on the south coast of Iceland, they put them in a bottle and added some tobacco for those who found and forwarded the letters. The bottle was thrown into the sea in a southerly wind so that it could be driven across to Iceland.

If a message in a bottle is sent today, it is mostly out of curiosity: The bottle contains a short message from the sender and his postal address. The aim in this case is to get a short message from a place as far away as possible where the bottle was washed up. It is not uncommon for stamp collectors to send off a message in a bottle with a postcard and the expectation that they will get the card back with a foreign postage stamp.

Scientific use

As an aid to science, the message in a bottle has contributed significantly to the research of the direction and speed of the ocean current, first in 1802 to the exploration of the Gulf Stream , later in the investigations of Prince Albert of Monaco , the Deutsche Seewarte in Hamburg, which had been using forms for the purpose since 1878, and the American Navy Department in Washington. The bottles were provided with a bottle finder sheet, which contained the exact time and geographical location of the place where the message in a bottle was handed over to the sea. The finder was asked in several languages ​​to note the time and place and then to deliver the slip to the hydrographic institute in his country. The routes of such bottle posts have been recorded on so-called bottle cards since 1842 , which sometimes document considerable distances and surprising speeds. For example, a bottle ejected in the area of ​​the equatorial current covered 2700 nautical miles in 154 days , i.e. 17 nautical miles per day.

Another example is that of the German brig Marco Polo , which launched a bottle on August 23, 1873 at 48 ° 11 'north latitude and 6 ° 56' west longitude at 8 o'clock. This was found on October 26, 1873 at 4 p.m. near Oudeschild on Texel ( Netherlands ) (53 ° 3 ′ north latitude, 4 ° 11 ′ east longitude). So about 8.3 nautical miles were covered every day .

In the Arctic in particular , the message in a bottle has been used with success to convey messages of polar expeditions .

As the modern successor to the message in a bottle, the drift buoy took over the task of determining the directions of the ocean currents . In 2008, around 3,000 of these devices were exposed on the world's oceans. see also: Argo (program) .

A load of rubber ducks that had gone overboard developed into an involuntary scientific use, see: Friendly Floatees .

Overcoming closed borders

For more than 2 years - as of April 2018 - defectors from North Korea to South Korea have been throwing bottles of food, rice, money, medicines, political information, USB sticks with music into the sea on an island in South Korea twice a month in the hope that they will be from North Koreans being found.

Records

The oldest preserved message in a bottle was thrown into the water by Georg von Neumayer at Cape Horn on July 14, 1864 , and was found on June 9, 1867. Today it is part of the collection of messages in a bottle of the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency in Hamburg. The collection includes 662 returned letters, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The lists are chronologically summarized in five books from 1864 to 1933, whereby the years 1901 to 1927 were lost as a result of the Second World War.

An entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the most impossible message in a bottle was given to a wine bottle in 1998, which was thrown in a bottle at Hennef in Sieg in 1993 and was found in Falmouth ( Maine ) in 1996 .

An entry in the Guinness Book of Records 2001 as the world's smallest message in a bottle that can be mailed was made for a bottle with a diameter of 25 mm and a height of 95 mm. It was presented by Rainer Krempel from Remscheid on March 16, 2000.

The message in a bottle with the longest proven delivery time up to that point was a letter that was released by a German South Pole expedition near Tasmania in 1903 and washed up in New Zealand on March 19, 1955.

At the end of August 2012, the message in a bottle, which had been in the sea for the longest time, was found by a fisherman off the Shetland Islands north of Scotland . Researchers from Glasgow threw the bottle into the sea with almost 2,000 other bottles in June 1914. Inside the bottle was a postcard and a request to the finder to send the card back to the fisheries authority. A small reward was promised for this. The aim was to create a map of the ocean currents off Scotland. The Guinness Book of Records confirmed that no previously known message in a bottle was longer in the sea.

In March 2014 it was reported that the fisherman Konrad Fischer from Heikendorf in Schleswig-Holstein in the Kiel Fjord found the oldest message in a bottle as bycatch in his net. The beer bottle contained a postcard with two postage stamps from the German Empire and dated May 17, 1913. The sender asks the finder to send the card back to his address. It is exhibited today in the International Maritime Museum Hamburg .

However, in 1874, when he persuaded the crew of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition to persevere , Carl Weyprecht wrote a message in a bottle in which he described the events, and at that time also handed it over to the sea. This bottle was found 104 years later, in 1978, by a Russian researcher, Vladimir Serov, on the island of Lamont in Franz Josef Land. It came to Vienna through diplomatic channels in 1980 and is now owned by the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

In April 2015, a woman strolling on Amrum beach found a message in a bottle that George Parker Bidder III of the MBA in Plymouth, UK , had dropped into the sea on November 30, 1906. At that time, Bidder had placed around 1,000 bottles in the North Sea in order to be able to prove the east-west current in its depth range. The bottles were trimmed by lead weights or sand ballast so that they only drifted just above the seabed. The finder had sent the postcard enclosed with the bottle back to the MBA as requested and received the schilling from the time promised on the postcard as a finder's reward. In March 2016, this message in a bottle, which had been in the sea for 108 years and 138 days, was confirmed by the Guinness World Records as the oldest message in a bottle in history.

On January 21, 2018 , a message in a bottle over 131 years old was discovered on Wedge Island Beach, north of Perth , Australia. In the bottle was a printed form in German, addressed to the " Seewarte in Hamburg ". Since the handwriting on it was partially legible, the date could be set on June 12, 1886. According to research by the Western Australia Museum in Perth, she was thrown from the German cargo barque Paula into the Indian Ocean in order to research ocean currents as part of a long-term project of the sea observatory, in which thousands of bottles were released from obligated German ships. By handwriting comparison with the log book, the ship's captain O. Diekmann was identified as the author.

Similar procedures

Balloon mail is the analogous method of sending undirected messages through the air. Balloon mail has the advantage that it can be launched from anywhere on earth and in principle can also reach any place on earth. The start of a balloon mail is also easier to carry out, since there is no problem in the air comparable to the surf.

Messages comparable to messages in a bottle have also been sent into space. The space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 have a gold plaque and the Voyager space probes have a gold data plate on board in case they should be found by aliens.

With a time capsule , messages or things (coins, chronicles, newspapers etc.) are deposited or walled in to an unknown, future finder.

Message in a bottle as a trademark

The name Bottle Post is a registered, protected trademark. The first property rights were registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office in 1990. Further brands for other classes of goods and services followed between 1991 and 2006.

Message in a bottle in art

A message in a bottle often serves as a stylistic means to entangle the hitherto uninvolved finder in an adventure, or as a last resort from the hopeless situation of the main character, which cannot be managed alone.

Exhibitions and collections

The bottle post machine by artist Kirsten Kaiser provided bottles, corks, forms and pencils in the Museum for Communication in Hamburg .

The Cologne artist Joachim Römer has been collecting messages from bottles, glasses, cans or even balloons from the Rhine on Cologne's Rhine beach since 1998. In 2015, the collection comprised around 1400 objects that he used for his installation “1000 and 1 Message in a Bottle”. This traveling exhibition was shown in the Museum am Strom in Bingen am Rhein and subsequently in the Duisburg Museum of German Inland Shipping .

In the Museum of Communication Frankfurt , the exhibition "The power and against time was from May 16 to September 4 2016th Flotsam in a bottle ”.

Message in a bottle as a metaphor

Theodor W. Adorno first used the metaphor “Message in a Bottle” in relation to New Music (“Nobody wants to have anything to do with it, it goes unheard without an echo”) and later in exile also with regard to his own theory. In this sense, theory as a message in a bottle means sending something into the unknown, without an addressee - in the hope that this addressee will be born in a future. Sometimes the metaphor is also used in the sense of a legacy, as in Friedrich Kittler's message in a bottle to the future of Till Nikolaus von Heiseler .

In the literature

In the movie

In music

In the theatre

  • Sandra Lüpkes : Wiegand lugworm and the mysterious message in a bottle, children's musical

Further meaning

literature

  • Scholl: The message in a bottle from the Seewarte. 1898.
  • Archives for mail and telegraphy. Published on behalf of the Reich Ministry of Post. Verlag Postzeitungsamt Berlin W .:
    • 1901; P. 598
    • 1911; P. 252
  • Handheld dictionary of postal services
    • 1st edition; P. 236 (Article by Heinrich Herzog, President of the OPD Frankfurt (Oder))
    • 2nd Edition; P. 272
  • The archive , issue 2/2016, ISSN  1611-0838 (main topic: bottle and rocket mail )
    • Jürgen Bräunlein: Washed into the hand by chance - A short story of the bottle posts . Pp. 6-9 and 11-13
    • Jürgen Bräunlein: Bottle items - handout for practice . P. 10
    • Thomas Seibert: The artist as a flaneur - Joachim Römer's message in a bottle in an art context . Pp. 14-21
    • Julia Bastian in conversation with Joachim Römer: Going against the clock - A message in a bottle at the MKF . Pp. 49-51
    • Stefan Frank: With the current across the seas - The message in a bottle collection of the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency . Pp. 62-67
    • Margret Baumann: Post-Art-Museum - A message in a bottle by the artist Rolf Sturm . P. 80.
  • Oliver Lück: Message in a bottle stories. About people, their letters and the Baltic Sea. Rowohlt, 2016.

Web links

Commons : Message in a bottle  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Message in a bottle  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Concise dictionary of the postal system . 1st edition. P. 236.
  2. ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system . 2nd Edition
  3. ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system . 1st edition.
  4. ↑ Spiegel-online, April 13, 2008
  5. ↑ Korea Summit: Kim and Moon remove loudspeakers orf.at, May 1, 2018, accessed May 1, 2018.
  6. ↑ BSH - Message in a bottle. Retrieved August 20, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Wanderlust you can touch . someday
  8. ↑ bild.de
  9. ↑ Unearthed - News from archeology . Spiegel Online , September 16, 2012; accessed on the same day.
  10. ↑ After the auction failed: Berlin message in a bottle remains in the museum. In: tagesspiegel.de. Retrieved June 3, 2015 .
  11. ^ Message in a bottle from Berlin stays in the museum . Der Tagesspiegel , July 31, 2014
  12. ↑ Carl Weyprecht exhibition ( Memento of the original from August 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved November 5, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.carl-weyprecht.org
  13. ↑ Weyprecht exhibition ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 108 kB) Flyer for the 125th anniversary of Weyprecht in 2006; Retrieved October 5, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dmg-ev.de
  14. ↑ Oldest message in a bottle . guinnessworldrecords.de, March 17, 2016; Retrieved April 20, 2016
  15. ↑ Christoph Sator: News from Bismarck's times - record find: a 132 year old message in a bottle is discovered at a stand in Australia; in Allgemeine Zeitung (Mainz) on March 7, 2018; P. 32
  16. ↑ Message in a bottle found in Australia after 132 years orf.at, March 6, 2018, accessed March 6, 2018. - With video (1:07) (English)
  17. ↑ 132 year old message in a bottle found on WA beach. In: museum.wa.gov.au. Western Australian Museum, March 6, 2018.
  18. ↑ Register number: 1166165. German Patent and Trademark Office, accessed on June 16, 2012 .
  19. ^ Exhibition "1000 and 1 Message in a Bottle" in Bingen Poetic Treasures of the Rhine by Manuela Hübner on swr.de from April 17, 2015
  20. ↑ Joachim Römer turns message in a bottle into art ... Everything is in flux ( Memento of the original from June 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by Gerd Michalek on wdr.de on November 16, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.wdr.de
  21. ↑ Kerstin Stolt, Teddy's Message in a Bottle , John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (1997)