Message in a bottle

„Dear mermaids and seamen, how can I become one of you? I love to swim, play in the water and watch colourful fish. So just let me know! This was my first message in a bottle, that 5 year old me stuffed in an empty fanta bottle and threw into the Donau river, but who came up with this way of communication?

 It might be suprising for you but I never got an answer to my message!

But now that I think of my first approach to communicate with the fantasy world, the idea of the the water delivering a message does not seem that stupid and I surely was not the first one to think that. So here we go with this weeks Speak if it's Greek: Was the first serious try to let messages be delivered from the sea maybe made by the Greeks?

To figure that out let me tell you a bit more about the history of the famous message in the bottle:

In the 16th century, the English navy, among others, used bottle messages to send ashore information about enemy positions. Queen Elisabeth I created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles", and anyone else opening the bottles could face the death penalty.

Since 1876, people have often used messages adrift in containers to communicate from the remote Scottish island of St Kilda.

But the history dates back until already around 300 years BC: Attempts were made to prove, that the seas are connected. In order to prove that, bottles were tossed into the sea to see where they would end up. Of course they were never found, but this early experiment is probably the first sientific approach of bottle messaging. Well, now it's up to you if you are team hellas because duh, they have plenty of sea around them and the brightes minds of history were Greek! But then again everyone randomly could have had the idea of tossing a bottle with a love note into the sea or a river and that way invent the message in a bottle without even wanting...