Tourist stumbled across a 132-year-old message in a bottle thought to be part of an old German experiment

A tourist has stumbled across a message in a bottle that’s 132 years old and is thought to be part of an old German experiment.

Sending someone a message was a lot more complicated a hundred years ago than it is now.

We use our phones to drop notes to people around the world who receive them instantly without a second thought.

The message in a bottle was uncovered 132 years later (SEAN GLADWELL/Getty)

But getting a message across to someone far away wasn’t always so easy.

The message in a bottle is a classic - although not very reliable - method of reaching out to someone.

In fact, the first documented messages sent in bottles date all the way back to 310 BCE when Greek philosopher Theophrastus released some in an attempt to prove his theory that the Atlantic Ocean flows into the Mediterranean.

Now a new bottle has been discovered bobbing along the ocean with a message tucked safely inside.

In 2018, a woman named Tonya Illman found the bottle on a beach north of Wedge Island in Australia.

The bottle left Cardiff in 1886 (Burazin/Getty)

At the time, she said: “It just looked like a lovely old bottle so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase.

“My son’s girlfriend was the one who discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out. The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting on it.”

Further investigations uncovered suspicions from Illman that the bottle was from an experiment by the German Naval Observatory to study ocean surface currents.

In the experiments, notes were placed into bottles with the date they were thrown out to sea and a request for the finder to return the bottle with information of when and where they discovered it.

The note is believed to have been part of a German experiment (Dennis O'Clair/Getty)

The bottles would be returned to either the German Naval Observatory or a German consulate.

Details on Illman’s bottle revealed that it had been on a ship sailing from Cardiff, Wales, to Makassar, Indonesia, in 1886.

Assistant Curator Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Museum, Dr Ross Anderson, said: “Incredibly, an archival search in Germany found Paula’s original Meteorological Journal and there was an entry for 12 June 1886 made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard.

“The date and the coordinates correspond exactly with those on the bottle message.”