Message in a bottle arrives after a century

The bottle was tossed into the North Sea between 1904 and 1906, the Marine Biological Association of the UK, based in the southern English city of Plymouth, said Friday.

"We were very excited," the Association spokesman Guy Baker told reporters. "We certainly weren't expecting to receive any more of the postcards."

The bottle was found by a couple on the German island of Amrum. Inside it, there was a postcard asking the finders to send it to the research association, with a promise of a money reward of exactly one shilling - a twentieth of a British pound.

The shilling is not used as a means of payment in Britain anymore, as it was abandoned when the country adopted decimal currency in 1971. It was replaced with the 5-pence coin, today worth 7 euro cents - as the pound has lost much of its buying power compared to 110 years ago.

Breaking the record

Around 1,000 of such postcards were set on their voyage by researcher George Parker Bidder, who later became the president of the Marine Biological Association. The bottles were used in a study into the movement of sea currents, and were weighed down to float just above the sea bed.

Most of them, however, were trawled out by fishermen and returned decades ago, Baker said.

The marine researchers intend to ask the Guinness Book of Records to recognize the Amrum message as the oldest ever found.

Currently, the title belongs to a bottle released in 1914 for a scientific experiment and found two years ago.

The British association also kept its word on the reward, sending an old shilling to the German couple.

dj/tj/sgb (AP, dpa)