It’s Magic Monday, the day of Romance on
Keira’s Corner. Today’s subject, Message in a Bottle is not normally a romantic
phrase. But somewhere along the line, the idea of receiving a message in a bottle
became, romanticized...by woman, books and Hollywood.
The Song (press play)
The Book
The Movie
A woman discovers a tragic love letter in a bottle on a beach, and is determined to track down its author.
Quotes from Message in a bottle 1999
Dodge Blake: If I was about 150 years younger, you'd be in
trouble, young lady.
Dodge Blake: Choose between yesterday and tomorrow.
Garret Blake: Teresa, I don't want to lose you.
Theresa Osborne: Then don't.
Theresa Osborne: Have you lived here your whole life?
Garret Blake: Not yet.
Theresa Osborne: And you'll just forget about me, right?
Garret Blake: Every day.
Theresa Osborne: If some lives form a perfect circle, others
take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been a part
of my journey. But it has also shown me what is precious. So has a love for
which I can only be grateful.
Theresa Osborne: What if you got mad at me. It's a small
boat.
Garret Blake: I don't like fighting, Theresa. Bowling either.
Theresa Osborne: So you *used* to be charming. Sorry I
missed that.
There is even a website dedicated too... You
guessed it. http://messageinabottle.com/
Wikipedia
info
A message in a bottle is a form of communication whereby a
message is sealed in a container (archetypically a glass bottle, but could
be any medium, so long as it floats and remains waterproof) and released into
the sea or ocean. Among other
purposes they are used for scientific studies of ocean currents.
The first recorded messages in bottles were released around
310 BC by the Ancient Greek philosopher
Theophrastus,
as part of an experiment to show that the Mediterranean
Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic
Ocean.[verification needed]
On his return to Spain following his first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus's ship entered a severe
storm. Columbus threw a report of his discovery along with a note asking it to
be passed on to the Queen of Spain, in a sealed cask into the
sea, hoping the news would make it back even if he did not survive. In fact,
Columbus survived and the sealed report was never found, or at least, its
discovery never reported.[verification needed]
In the 16th century, the English navy,
among others, used bottle messages to send ashore information about enemy
positions. Queen Elizabeth I even created an official
position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles", and anyone else opening the
bottles could face the death penalty.[1]
In 1784 Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message detailing his and 43
shipmates' shipwrecking in a bottle that washed ashore and was found by a
Japanese seaweed collector in 1935, in the village of Hiraturemura, the birthplace
of Chunosuke Matsuyama]
Since 1876, people have often used messages adrift in
containers to communicate from the remote Scottish island of St Kilda. [3]
In 1914, British World War I
soldier Private Thomas Hughes tossed a green ginger beer bottle containing a
letter to his wife into the English
Channel. He was killed two days later fighting in France. In 1999,
fisherman Steve Gowan dredged up the bottle in the River
Thames. Although the intended recipient of the letter had died in 1979, it
was delivered in 1999 to Private Hughes' 86-year old daughter living in New Zealand.[5]
In February 1916 the doomed crew of Zeppelin L 19 dropped their last messages to
their superiors and loved ones into the North Sea. These washed up on the Kattegat coast
near Gothenburg,
Sweden six months later.[6]
On a lonely night in December 1945, American World War
II veteran Frank Hayostek tossed a bottle over the side of his
ship. It was recovered by an Irish milk maid, Breda O'Sullivan who set off an
exchange of letters that lasted seven years before the two finally met amid an
international media circus. Despite (or perhaps because of) the media
attention, the two were never able to get their romance off the ground.
In May 2005 eighty-eight shipwrecked migrants
were rescued off the coast of Costa Rica. They had placed an SOS message in a bottle
and tied it to one of the long lines of a passing fishing
boat.
The oldest message in a bottle was verified on 30 August
2012, by Guinness World Records, when a drift bottle
released in June 1914 was found by Andrew Leaper, skipper of the Shetland-based
Copious, ironically the same fishing vessel involved in the previous record
recovery.[8]
That previous record was a find that spent 92 years 229 days
at sea. A bottom drift bottle, numbered 423B, was released at 60° 50'N 00° 38'W
(about halfway between Aberdeen, Scotland and the coast of Denmark) on April
25, 1914 and recovered by fisherman Mark Anderson of Bixter, Shetland, UK, on
December 10, 2006.[9]
Similar methods using other media
Balloon mail is a similar method of sending undirected
messages through the air. The advantage of balloon mail is that it can be
launched anywhere and can in principle reach any point on Earth. A further
advantage is that it can be launched more easily, since a bottle dropped into
the ocean could be washed back to land by the surf.
The glass interior shell of the Westinghouse Time Capsules of the 1939 New York World's Fair and 1964 New York World's Fair was made of Pyrex, where the
exterior metal casing was a special copper alloy of "Cupaloy" (1938)
or "Kromarc" stainless steel (1965) to withstand the effects of 5000
years of time, when they are expected to arrive to the people intended.
The U.S. space
agency NASA has
launched several interstellar "messages in bottles." A graphic
message in the form of a 6 by 9-inch gold-anodized aluminium plaque, known as
the Pioneer
plaque, was bolted to the frames of the Pioneer 10
(launched on March 2, 1972) and Pioneer 11
(launched on April 5, 1973) spacecraft.
In August and September 1977, NASA launched two spacecrafts,
together called the Voyager Project. Each carries a 12-inch gold-plated
copper disk, known as the Voyager Golden Record, containing recorded
sounds and images representing human cultures and life on Earth.
In 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2008 the Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope
has transmitted messages to any potential extraterrestrial civilizations:
In popular culture
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story entitled "MS. Found in a Bottle", possibly intended
as a satire of sea tales.
Eyedea
wrote a song called "Bottle Dreams", which refers to a girl who sends
a daily message in a bottle into a river; after her death about 500 messages in
bottles are found.
Nicholas Sparks's novel Message in a Bottle was made into a film
of the same name in 1999.
In the 1977 Disney animated film, The
Rescuers, captured protagonist Penny sent out a distress message in a
bottle at the beginning of the movie in the hopes that someone will find it and
rescue her.
In the 2009 BBC Radio 4 comedy sketch series Bigipedia one
sketch covered the history of "The Desert Island Bore", a woman who
has written more messages in bottles than anyone in history, but has never been
rescued from the desert island because all the letters are boring.
In a second season episode of Gilligan's Island called
"The Postman Cometh", it is revealed that Mary Ann writes a daily
letter to her boyfriend Horace (who she later admits is a "real
creep" and wasn't really her boyfriend at all, just a boy she hardly knew
that she invented a romance with because Ginger had so many beaux and Mrs.
Howell had her husband, so she wanted somebody to think that there was someone
waiting for her back home).
Tell me what you think. Would receiving a
message in a bottle be romantic to you? What would be?
If I found a message left by him, I would
find it very romantic :)
Have an awesome day!
Hugs,
Keira
