¡@¡@Sending a message to somebody is easy: just use a cellphone to send a text or a computer to send an email. However, it has not always been so simple. For hundreds of years, people wrote messages on pieces of paper, put them into bottles, and tossed them into the ocean. They would then hope that the message would reach its destination. Most of the time, the message in a bottle would disappear, never to be seen again. On a few occasions, the message did arrive, and sometimes there were some surprising results.
¡@¡@In 1914, a sailor tossed a bottle containing a message to his wife over the side of a ship. He died two days later. Then in 1999, the bottle was found floating in the Thames River in London. The message was delivered to his daughter, who was then 86 years old and living in New Zealand. On another occasion, a young Scottish girl threw a message in a bottle into the sea. When a 10-year-old Dutch boy found the message, he searched for the author, and many years later asked for her hand in marriage. The romance of finding a message in a bottle has inspired many songs, poems, novels, and movies, and because of these stories, we can see why.