An American woman found a bottle with a 148-year-old message on the shore and assumed that it is the oldest in the world, writes the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Amy Smith Murphy was walking along Ocean City Beach early one morning when she noticed a corked green bottle with a piece of paper inside at the water's edge. The woman took the find to her mother's house to look at it with her family.
Murphy's nephews were able to open the bottle with a corkscrew and remove a letter from it. However, they could not understand the writing and turned to an expert on similar bottles, auction house employees and Reddit users for help. In search of information about the author, the time and the content of the message, the woman also starts reading newspaper archives.
Using an antiques and collectibles appraisal website, Murphy determined that the bottle she found was made in 1870. One side of the label on the bottle looked like the business card of a company prominent in 19th-century Philadelphia.
/p>
After some time, Murphy was able to determine that the message read as follows: “Yacht Neptune off the coast of Atlantic City. New Jersey. August 6 – 76 years.” Murphy believes that "76" is shortened from the year the bottle was thrown into the water - 1876. She contacted the Guinness Book of World Records to record this letter in a bottle as the oldest letter discovered in the world. This is now believed to be a letter dated June 12, 1886, discovered in Australia in 2016.
Murphy continues to explore the history of the bottle on TikTok. Her latest discovery is the identification of the likely author of the message as Captain Samuel Gale, who built the yacht "Neptune" in 1874, according to an archived newspaper account.