'World's oldest message in a bottle' reaches granddaughter

BERLIN (AFP) - A museum said yesterday that a message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago is considered to be the world's oldest message in the bottle. The bottle reached the sender's granddaughter.

A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic Sea, close to the northern city of Kiel, last month.

"This is certainly the first time such an old message in a bottle was found, particularly with the bottle intact", he said.

Researchers then started digging for identifying the author and managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives in Berlin.

"It was almost unbelievable", Mrs. Erdmann told German news agency DPA. She got into possesion of the bottle last week, at the Hamburg museum. Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder to return it to his home address in Berlin.

"That was a pretty moving moment", the sender's granddaughter said. "Tears rolled down my cheeks".

Researchers were able to determine the identity of sender, based on the address that it was 20-year-old baker's son Richard Platz, who threw the bottle in the Baltic Sea - while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913.

A Berlin-based genealogical researcher could afterwards locate Erdmann, who never knew Platz. Her mother's father died in 1946 at the age of 54.

A handwriting comparison with letters penned by Platz later in life confirmed that he was "without a doubt" the author.

Erdmann told local newspapers that the discovery had inspired her to look through family scrapbooks to learn more about her grandfather, who seemed to be a Social Democrat that liked reading.

Much of the ink on the postcard has been rendered illegible with time and dampness. 

The discovery will be on display at the museum until May 1st, after which experts will set to work trying to decipher the rest of the message.

The Guinness World Records had previously identified the oldest message in a bottle as dating from 1914. It spent nearly 98 years at sea before being fished from the water.