Message In Bottle HISTORY:

NOTE: THIS PAGE IS "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" AND INCOMPLETE AT THIS TIME

Several years ago I came up with a rather unique idea ("Message In  Bottle", of course).  As you know, today we talk about this being the "space and communications age". We have the ability to travel by air, land and sea faster than ever before. We also are users of what have become extremely fast and efficient ways of communicating with each other around the world

Let me tell you a bit of the history of my idea.  You see, I've always been interested in Benjamin Franklin.  He lived in colonial times in the city of Philadelphia, Pensylvania.  According to his autobiography, I can see he was the kind of man who could have "fit" into modern America of today with the greatest of ease.    I say this because he was a man filled with creative ideas that seemed to make his thinking and lifestyle far in advance of what was normal back in the 1700's. One of Ben's observations during his voyages to and from England was the discovery of the  nature of the Gulf Stream as it flows along the eastern coast of what is now the United States. He discovered many facts about the Gulf Stream that had been unknown up to that time. They were facts that soon became very important and useful as valuable aids to navigation back then.

The Gulf Stream originates in the Gulf Of Mexico

WHY AM A TELLING YOU ALL OF THIS ABOUT FRANKLIN AND THE GULF STREAM?

I'll tell you why. It is to let you know that I am planning to offer you the opportunity, the fun and  excitement of being able to tell your family and friends about the  "mail"  you've sent as a "bottled" message. Your Message In Bottle will be dropped in the always moving: Gulf Stream off the coast of New Jersey!  In addition, I want you to know there is a great posibility that your "Message In Bottle" or Bottle Mail,  will never get delivered to anyone - anywhere! But...

...On the other hand, you could be pleasently surprised when, one day, you actually hear from a person - perhaps someone on the other side of the world -or somewhere in America, or Newfoundland, or Norway or who knows where--- that could be the person who found your message in a bottle where it washed up on a nearby beach after a storm. The person opened your Message In Bottle (Bottle Mail), read your letter, and then used regular mail to join in the fun of answering your long lost but eagerly anticipated -  Message In Bottle!

Of course, this kind of communication - Message In A Bottle -  is extremely slow and unreliable and nothing like what we are accustomed to these days - in fact - is it is one of the most ancient ways of communicating... but... it still works! 

Here is some interesting history about   messages in  bottles:

BOTTLE MAIL' S INTERESTING HISTORY from 310 BC to 2006!

We are told the first recorded messages were "mailed" around 310 BC by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus. He claimed it was part of an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea had been formed by the water flowing from the Atlantic Ocean.

Christopher Columbus was returning to Spain after is first voyage to the New World when his ship was hit by a terrible storm that lasted many days, and thinking he would not survive, he put a report of his discovery, addressed to the Queen of Spain, in watertight cask and threw it in the rough sea with the hope that the news would eventually make it to Spain even if he did not survice the storm. But, Columbus did survive and his sealed report is still out there - somewhere.

In the 1600s the sailors in the English navy used bottle mail to send information about the positions of their enemy.  We're told Queen Eizabeth 1 appointed a cabinet member to be the official "Uncorker Of Ocean Bottles" and the death penaly was given to anyone other than this official who dared to open a bottled message.

Back in the late 1700s a Japanese captain named Chunsoske Matsuyama used bottle mail to explain the details of his shipwreck.   In 1935 a Japanese seaweed collector found the bottled message near the Japanese village of Hiraturemura, where Captain Matsuyama was born. 

During World War I in 1914, an English private, Thomas Hughes, stuffed a letter to his wife in a green ginger beer bottle and tossed it into the English Channel. Two days later he was killed while fighting in France.  In 1999, Steve Gowan a fisherman found the bottle in the River Thames.  The widow of Private Hughes had died in 1979, but Hughes' daughter, now 86 and living in New Zealand, was found and the Bottle Mail letter was forwarded to her.

In 1916 the crew of the Zepplin L-19, in trouble over the North Sea, bottle mailed  their final messages to loved ones and superior offices and dropped them iin the North Sea before their final crash into the sea. The bottled mail message were found six months later on the Kattegat coast near Gotheburg, Sweden.

In 1943 a sailor on the USS Beatty bottle mailed a message and dropped over the side in the Mediterranean Sea. The handwritten message said: "Our ship is sinking. SOS didn't do any good. Think it's the end. Maybe this message will get to the U.S.some day."  About a year later someone found the bottle off the coast of Maine. afterit had floated several hundred miles across the North Atlantic. 

Back in 2005 a number of shipwrecked migrants were rescued near Costa Rica. They had sent an SOS message in a bottle and tied it to the long lines of a fishing boat that had passed close to them without stopping.

Guinness World Record said the oldest message in a bottle was in the sea for almost 93 yeaars; another bottle mail that was thrown into the sea in 1914, near Aberdeen, Scotland and Denmark was found by a fisherman near Shetland, UK in 2006.

(To be continued after I figure out all of the details of how this idea can be offered to you, with assurance - proof -  that I will do what I say I will do with your bottled messages. I have to figure out a way to get the bottles in the Gulf Stream in the Ocean, how to charge you for the "postage" in a reasonable amount, decide what kind of bottles to use - and more),

Have questions? Send me an email at: originalsbyweber@gmail.com

I'd like to know what you think of this idea- good or bad please tell me,  I want to do this right - or not at all. Terry