132 year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach | Hacker News Reader

132 year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach

museum.wa.gov.au

318 pointsSomeone104 comments

In case you couldn't get through because of the HN hug of death here's another link to the same story: http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-06/oldest-known-messag...

>>Between 1864 until 1933, thousands of bottles were thrown overboard from German ships, each containing a form on which the captain would write the date, the ship's coordinates and details about its route.

It was part of an experiment by the German Naval Observatory to better understand global ocean currents.<<

Now I wonder: did that actually work to get a better understanding of these currents?

Maybe; I mean, see [0] where an accidental experiment was made when a container with >28k rubber ducks and other floating toys, tipped. New evidence for some models was discovered using roughly the same idea—by tracking the floting toys to their final locations.

——

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees

I seem to recall reading about a similar event involving a container of shoes that went overboard in the pacific, that allowed some scientists to test a computer model by predicting where the shoes would end up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_Carrier

I would imagine that since a large part of the duck sits out of the water, that the wind would introduce enough variance to render the data fairly useless.

Quite possibly.

The Tokio Express[0] Lego spill[1] has provided some data on ocean currents. There was also a spill of yellow bath ducks that turn up on beaches around the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokio_Express#Accident

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28582621

Yaarr!!

The thing that sticks out to me is that they expect lego pieces to hit washington state 23 years after the spill without biodegrading.

I hope we're able to fix that someday.

That Lego are durable and don't rot is, I would say, a feature not a bug. (It would be better if they were practically recyclable, OTOH.)

I consider that a pro. Instead of buying new sets, the toys get down-cycled to younger children or gifted to some other kids. It's better than toys which because they don't last, they get bought at a higher velocity, thus producing waste.

Of interest, Lego will begin MFG 1-2% of their toys [apropos mostly "vegetation"] from plant-based plastics[1]. Possibly resulting in higher prices for sugar--which may also be a good thing.

[1]https://www.cips.org/supply-management/news/2018/march/lego-...

Lego are made from ABS, and ABS can be recycled.

ABS can be recycled, but normal municipal recycling (which has to take and sort multiple recyclables mechanically) can't practically sort ABS pieces the size of Lego bricks for proper recycling, which results in them ending up in landfills from municipal recycling. If you set up dedicated collection infrastructure for Lego bricks and delivered them in huge lots (or merged them with another waste ABS stream) for delivery to an ABS recycler you could recycle them, but the logistics and economics don't seem likely to be workable for that.

https://newatlas.com/lego-plant-plastics/53656/

Map of the yellow ducks: https://i.imgur.com/CrJbTo9.jpg

What time is it. Where am I. What is my name. Where am I from. Who is my captain. Where have I come from. Where am I going to.

This note in a bottle knows more about itself than I do.

Well, it knows where it wants to go to. Arrival is not guaranteed. This may still be more than you and I know about ourselves, though.

Do I have to want to go somewhere? What if I’m already where I wanted to go?

Wow, UDP packet from 132 years ago :-)

Here's the authentication report: http://museum.wa.gov.au/maritime-archaeology-db/sites/defaul...

That's some highly impressive work right there.

"Upon his return to Germany and having been appointed as Director of the Deutsche Seewarte, Neumayer conceived and implemented the drift bottle experiment that would last from 1864 to 1933, and include thousands of bottles. Of all these jettisoned bottles only an estimated 8-10% (662 message slips) found their way back to Hamburg"

10% is not bad really.

Also, it gives you a rough estimate of the chance of your 'rescue' message ever reaching anyone.

Note to self: If lost at sea, do at least 10 message-in-a-bottles.

Kym and Tonya Illman's website has good pictures of the bottle and message:

https://www.kymillman.com/oldest-message-in-a-bottle/

I enjoyed the part where they quote themselves.

I am really amazed that a ships log from 132 years ago was retained and is still available. Is this a common thing?

It's one of the primary methods to study historical weather patterns.

I guess that once it's archived, it tends to stay that way.

Unless it doesn't.

"Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public." -- Quinn Norton.

Libraries have various traditions of burning. Alexandria (probably several times). The U.S. Library of Congress, in 1814, 1851, and 1825.

http://www.accessible-archives.com/2013/01/the-other-fire-at...

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/22/this-day-in-politi...

I know the U.S. Navy permanently retains the deck logs of its commissioned ships. The ONRL has some logs dating back to 1776.

A permanent retention policy wasn't, apparently, the reason ONRL has those logs, as those records are identified as “records acquired from private citizens”. [0]

[0] https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/0...

Yes, the permanent retention policy came well after the days of the Continental Navy.

Those requirements are currently set out in SECNAV M-5210.1. Nowadays, they're maintained by NAVHISTHERITAGECOM and then transferred to the National Archives after 30-years.

Archives of the Royal Navy officers logs seems to date back the 1660s.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/r...

This is interesting too. A less detailed class of records, but older.

http://www.medievalandtudorships.org/database/

The archives of the Spanish Archive of the Indies are a century older than that, and if the Portuguese Casa da Índia hadn't been destroyed in the great 1755 earthquake we'd have sailing records from the dawn of the Age of Discoveries. The records and maps were national secrets, and for good reason.

You do wonder if the NSA will declassify its records 100 years from now.

They have even older documents in Simancas

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_General_de_Simancas

Interesting if digital records will be quite as permanent as paper record; Will the problem of data loss be solved some day? Hard to know.

Depends on whether they're just being used for day-to-day work or, like a ship's log, they're actively getting archived. I think atm, printing and storing is still the way to go with that.

There are a lot of historical records that you'd never expect to have survived for so long in various archives.

There are massive archives of historical brewing data from various breweries in the UK dating back to the 1800s, this guy has a blog all about old British beer: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com

There are also parish records for births, deaths, and marriages going back centuries in the UK as well as taxation records for centuries.

People love keeping records of things.

If you want to have a look at what weird things we still have records of, have a look at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, it's a treasure trove of old data.

I wonder if in 200 years, they going to have people's browsing and location data from now. If yes that would be an unprecedented amount of records for historians.

Given the way digital storage works, I guess it will be more like us looking at old Egiptian, Mayan, Romman, Greek artifacts while wondering what their purpose was.

I don't think so myself tbf, it's not very informative information - unless maybe it's about someone important or influential. I'm sure most of my internet comments I've left behind over the past decade - tens of thousands of them on numerous websites - will hover around for years to come, but I doubt they'd have historical significance unless I become famous somehow. The writings of Aaron Schwarz became eternalised in a way since his death, they're frequently getting "resurrected" on HN for example.

I found a message in a bottle in Hamburg. Never did figure out what it says though. If anyone on HN is up for the challenge, here's a photo of it: https://photos.app.goo.gl/TximCkxHoliDmnwy1

Rotating your image such that the text is readable would be a useful modification.

Could you tell a bit more about where, when, how you found it?

I found it while canoeing along a canal in Hamburg, July of 2016. That's all the detail I remember.

In the middle right (under BLOND) is the word Schlange, which is German for snake and also a German surname.

At the bottom, there appears to be a repeated sequence of characters which might be the Polish surname Zakrzewski. There's also a digit sequence 098765-543210 012345-567890.

Hope that helps.

Judging by the image of the cigarette pack and the handwriting, this is clearly a doctor's prescription.

This looks like the work of a schizophrenic. It sounds demeaning but I've seen similarly "encoded" messages, often around some common item (like a cigarette pack). They write them during psychosis and later find them and obsess over their decryption.

> " ... The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting on it.”

It was damp? How does a slip of paper last 130 years when there's water in the bottle?

The article also mentions that the cork or whatever sealed the bottle was missing, so it sounds like the cork got dislodged when the bottle washed ashore and that's when the contents got damp.

Write a note on your iPad. Remove that silly pin number, turn it off. Put it in a bag. Put it in the attic. Live your life and forget all about it.

130 years later, the now obsolete technology is found. Boy they are gonna have a hard time reading that note you left.

This is when we get to appreciate a medium such as text. Our information is becoming more and more complicated to the point that it might become impossible to decipher, or near impossible.

Edit: missing word

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

> 130 years later, the now obsolete technology is found.

... And the NAND flash has long since drained it's charge.

LTO or 3592 tapes might survive?

You see it happening already, people are finding e.g. old tape drives from MOS Technology (http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5256) which could contain valuable information about the design of some older processors and such, but they're unreadable and/or rotted. Same for older films, which are finally getting painstakingly restored and digitized.

TL;DR if you're making something, and it turns into something great, make sure your older stuff, the stuff you did to work towards it, is archived somehow.

Would vinyl records make a better long-term storage medium than CDs or magnetic tapes?

Given the same environments; not really. Given heat and/or UV, vinyl is going to warp before thermoplastic (or foil glue -- except the cheapest cds). Given humidity tape is going to go bad quickly, but so will vinyl.

They didn't return it to the German Naval Observatory! The instructions were quite clear. I would have instantly mailed it in.

These days it's easier to send a faithful copy. The Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie has been informed:

http://www.bsh.de/de/Das_BSH/Presse/Pressearchiv/Pressemitte...

That message lasted longer than any URL on the web will.

yeah, but the indexing's a bitch

Well, the captain should have consulted with an SEO expert and used a robots.txt.

ship ships bottle bottles message messages ocean oceans sea seafaring currents ocean-currents weather nautical captain vessel

Pessimistic. The web hasn't even been around for that long, and the first URLs are still alive - here's the first one: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

This is the sort of experiment I'd like to take part in. "Here's a hundred bottles of gin. All you need to do is drink the gin, fill in the form and the log, put the form in the bottle, seal it, and throw the bottle overboard. On second thought, fill in the paperwork before you drink the gin."

The message in the gin bottle says:

"We're out of gin, please send more"

Does anybody know what material the bottle cap was made of? Since this was 1886 it couldn't have been plastic. Also I don't think any kind of metal (which most probably would have been non-stainless steel, copper or brass) would have survived the ocean and beach environments for that long.

I assume the bottle was corked.

The report says they were "corked and sealed". Probably with wax to prevent the cork rotting.

If it weren't from gov.au I'd say the story of trying to decipher a message in a bottle in anticipation of sunken treasuries only to find out it was part of hygrographic studies is sure a classic canard - it's even a classic Uncle Scrooge plot.

This story should remind us all how much of our consumer focused life is discarded on a everyday basis and what we will leave behind for future generations.

Did they use these historical artifacts for a photo shoot in the sand?

The text of the ABC article linked above states that the bottle was found sticking out of the sand, looked like a nice old one for the shelves to the finder - and letter was discovered when the bottle was emptied of sand.

Given that most late model portable pocket sized computers have very decent camera sensors in them these days, chances are it was taken on the spot there and then.

Considering it has spent 132 years floating in the ocean and then god knows how long sitting around in the sand what’s the harm?

Out of booze! Send more!

I'm surprised it didn't say "Dilly Dilly!" but it is cool what the original paper was about.

What is that a reference to?

Stupid Budweiser ads leading up to the Super Bowl

A TV (beer) ad here in the US.

Message in a bottle has a really shitty bitrate.

The latency is the insurmountable problem. The bandwidth could be immense with modern storage tech.

You could also use more bottles. Perhaps a hundred million would do?

If there's fishing in the area, it could be throttled by net neutrality compliance.

Not to mention the ridiculous percentage of packet loss.

~90% according to the report.

I don't see how it could "damp", yet in such good condition after such a long time. Ah right; ingress of moisture began just days or weeks before discovery. Very likely!

Hoax/fake, I think.

Did you read the article? The details of the bottle lines up with the ship captain's logs. It would have been quite elaborate hoax to correctly reference the logs, find a vintage bottle, paper and printing press and forge the handwriting... not saying it isn't possible but the museum staff seemed skeptical and were convinced by the evidence.

That's assuming the bottle, paper, and museum staff even exist. From where I'm sitting, this is just pixels and text.

> It would have been quite elaborate hoax to correctly reference the logs, find a vintage bottle, paper and printing press and forge the handwriting.

Ah, from that point of view it seems like a lot of effort. But suppose someone already happens to have the vintage bottle in their possession, from a long time ago. Then they happen to learn about this ship and its logs. "Hey, I have a bottle from around that time, ...".

All sorts of situations and combinations occur in the world without a lot of effort, due to things just falling in place. Then they look like they would require effort if viewed from the point of view of having been contrived.

It's similar reasoning to the greater ease of finding two documents with a colliding message digest hash, compared to finding a colliding document for a given document.

Sure, the given situation is hard to contrive, but it's one of an infinity of possible hoaxes, and there are many people in the world with many experiences and ideas and things in their possession and so on.

Yeah. Has anyone really ever seen this "Australia" in person?

So, connect the dots for me: everything reported against Australia is necessarily as real as Australia itself? Or where are you headed with this?

Well, I'm not opposed to the idea of Australia in general. It's really just some of the fantastical-sounding stuff you hear. Like do you really believe that there exists an island nation founded by British convicts which once lost a war against emus and is home to egg-laying mammals?

I've personally not been there, so I remain skeptical. And if I did go to "Australia" who's to say the plane wouldn't just fly in loops for 6 hours and land outside Las Vegas in an elaborately constructed set made to look like this fabled land of giant spiders and marsupials?

Seems the people who believe in Australia are the same ones who would blindly accept that the earth is round...

You'd also have to fake the stars in the night sky and trick everyone to not notice the timezone didn't change. Probably easier to fake a moon landing.

Technology has come a long way since we faked the last one.

You have me questioning my reality now.

This is the kind of nihilistic thinking that has given rise to the likes of Trump et al. But anyway, here's the press release from today's continuation of the Deutsche Seewarte: http://www.bsh.de/de/Das_BSH/Presse/Pressearchiv/Pressemitte... .

Are you real or just a chatbot?

How can one truly be sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

I post on HN, therefore I am.

What you are suggesting is possible. But IMOP just not very likely. Where's the motive? Is the potential reward worth the work?

Maybe the bottle had been sterilized the interior of the bottle with arsenic or something of that sort? In spite of the ingress of moisture, no mould or bacterium took hold.

>I don't see how it could "damp", yet in such good condition after such a long time.

Can you provide other pieces of paper from the same time period so we can compare their state of conservation?

Not ones that were left outside in a bottle that allowed them to become damp (without being soaked in a solution of arsenic or something).

Of course we have books and documents form that period that are in good shape.

What's your alternate theory here? That a ship from the 1800s sailing through tropical oceans is going to fill its bottles with zero humidity air before throwing them overboard? Of course there will be water inside the bottles, the air in the bottles will be humid, and temperature cycling through the seasons and from local weather will lead to formation of dew inside the bottle from time to time.

The full WA Museum report ( http://museum.wa.gov.au/maritime-archaeology-db/sites/defaul...) puts the longevity of the paper down to the bottle likely remaining buried in a layer of damp sand for most of the intervening time.

Note that the bottle was found open, but half-filled with sand.

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