Engineers find 132-year-old message in a bottle in the lighthouse wall

Engineers in Scotland were surprised when they discovered a special and rare find at a local lighthouse: a 132-year-old message in a bottle.

Northern Lighthouse Board mechanical engineer Ross Russell discovered the message in a bottle during one of his inspections of the 209-year-old lighthouse, which is currently part of the Corsewall Lighthouse Hotel in Barnhills, Scotland, according to the BBC. The New York Times and CBS News.

Russell told the BBC that he and his team were able to fish the lighthouse out from its place inside the wall, but waited for the Northern Lighthouse Board’s commissioned lighthouse keeper, Dr. Barry Miller, arrived to open it – a difficult task in itself. The bottle was capped with an old cork that was stuck to the glass and had to be carefully drilled open to get to the note.

“We were shaking, especially me,” Miller recalled Just. “I couldn’t keep my hands still and read the note to the other guys.”

How rare the item was only became clear when the note was taken out.

According to the Northern Lighthouse Board, the note dated 4 September 1892 detailed the former engineers of James Milne & Son Engineers, Milton House Works (James Wells Engineer, John Westwood Millwright, James Brodie Engineer and David Scott Labourer) and Lighthouse Die Guardians (John Wilson, John B. Henderson and John Lockhart) had been working at the time to install a new light at the top of the tower.

Miller commented Just that finding the note was a “huge coincidence” as they were supposed to be working on “the exact lens” that the engineers had installed from the past, and said he felt it was “a direct one.” “Notice from them to us”.

“It was so exciting, it was like meeting our colleagues from the past. It was actually like they were there,” Miller told BBC.

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“It was like touching her,” he added. “Like they were part of our team and not just four of us, we were all there sharing what they had written because it was tangible and you could see the style of their handwriting.” . They knew what they had done. They knew they had hidden it in such a place that it wouldn’t be found for a long, long time.

Russell, who found the bottle, told the BBC he was “completely astonished” after the note was read out to the engineering team.

“To be the first person to touch the bottle after 132 years was just overwhelming,” he said. “It’s a unique find.”

The Northern Lighthouse Board said the message in a bottle would be temporarily stored at its offices in Edinburgh until the lighthouse’s restoration was completed. Once that was done, they said they would return the bottle – this time with an additional message from the current engineers and zookeepers detailing their work.

“At some point in the future we may be able to communicate with someone else,” said Dr. Miller The Just.