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In Germany, a Message-in-a-Bottle Found 108 Years After Its Release
schwit1 writes with a report that an early 20th century experiment has generated a belated data point. One of many floating bottles released 108 years ago to study currents was recently found by a German couple; it washed up on a beach in Amrum, Germany. From The Independent:
When the couple unfurled the note inside, they found a message in English, German and Dutch. It asked the finder to fill in some information on where and when they had found the bottle, before returning it to the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. It said whoever did so would be rewarded with one shilling. Communications director of the Marine Biological Association, Guy Baker, told The Daily Telegraph: "It was quite a stir when we opened that envelope, as you can imagine." Once at the association, staff recognised the bottle was one of 1,020 released into the North Sea between 1904 and 1906 as part of a project to test the strength of currents. Mr Baker told the paper: "It was a time when they were inventing ways to investigate what currents and fish did. Many of the bottles were found by fishermen trawling with deep sea nets. Others washed up on the shore, and some were never recovered. Most of the bottles were found within a relatively short time. We're talking months rather than decades."
This is one of those situations where a sense of humor could make an interesting story into a great story.
The Marine Biological Association in Plymouth should buy a 1904 shilling (on eBay around $13) and send it to the German couple.
It would be the perfect story ending, generate some good-natured publicity, and the bottle and note are probably antiques of historical value. (Imagine the bottle and note in the Salem maritime museum (Peabody Essex Museum), with the above-mentioned story ending in the description.)
~100 characters, if we're going by how it would've been encoded for digital transmission at the time (5-bit baudot) we have 500 bits. 108 years is 3.4 gigaseconds. Data rate therefore is in the vicinity of 150 nanobit/second.