Mr. Struck, you are a literary scholar and recently also an expert on the history of the message in a bottle.

Who sent the first message in a bottle and when?

Novina Goehlsdorf

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper

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Supposedly Christopher Columbus when he returned from his first voyage to America.

According to Columbus, his ship got caught in a storm, he feared it would sink, his discovery would be withheld from the world and his heirs refused the bounty promised to him.

So he wrote a text about his discovery and sealed it in a small barrel, glass bottles did not exist yet, which he put in the sea.

This is the earliest message in a bottle that we know of today, but only because Columbus is known to have survived the storm and reported about it later;

the barrel has never been found.

Messages in bottles were only sent out more regularly much later.

When did the time of messages in bottles begin?

From the late 18th century, they were more frequently exposed from the mid-19th century.

That didn’t just require glass, but infrastructure: a seafaring that is spreading more and more globally, enough people who live on coasts who can pick up a message in a bottle, read it and forward it to where it should go.

First of all, an established postal system was needed.

The prerequisite for the message in a bottle was the modern flow of goods, people and news.

And it emerged as an instrument of the emerging oceanography.

So typical senders were not lonely stranded people or shipwrecked people?

Shipwrecked people have also released messages in bottles.

But that was never the main function of the message in a bottle, which was research.

At the end of the 18th century, the idea arose of using bottle posts for the comprehensive measurement of ocean currents, behind which power systems were first suspected.

The first isolated attempts were made in 1800, and from 1850 onwards research institutions systematically released messages in bottles.

They let messages in bottles drift in order to be able to explore and document currents.

How did this research go?

Scientists gave ship personnel or ship passengers small forms to take with them on their voyages, which also stated that the note should be returned to the issuing research institution if it was found.

The ship's passengers filled them with their coordinates and threw them overboard, sealed in a bottle.

If it was found, for example by beachcombers or fishermen, the finder should ideally bring the note back to the scientists, stating where the bottle was found.

This was mostly a multi-person process and was one of the first major citizen science projects, relying on the involvement of a wide variety of people who were not scientists.

As a literary scholar, how did you actually come up with this topic?

I ask myself that sometimes too.

I'm basically interested in the connection between literature and the history of science, but I came across the message in a bottle very accidentally because while researching another topic I came across an essay about the message in a bottle by the marine and polar researcher Georg Neumeyer, who was the first in Germany to publish the message in a bottle - Research has driven.

Then I found out that a collection of bottles found by Neumeyer in the 19th century, some of which he also had released, still exists.

It can be found at the Federal Office for Hydrographic and Maritime Shipping in Hamburg and is the only surviving collection of this kind.