Message in bottle found 135 years later

A plumber drilling a hole in the floor of a house in Edinburgh, Scotland, couldn’t believe his eyes when he found a bottle with a 135-year-old message inside.

50-year-old Peter Allan discovered the 19th-century capsule when he opened the floor right where the whiskey bottle had been left.

He then ran downstairs to inform the lady of the house.

Eilidh Stimpson had to break the bottle to read the note, and she says her two children were thrilled with the discovery.

Allan told BBC Scotland he couldn’t believe his luck as he cut the ground just above the bottle.

“Room 10 feet x 15 feet [cerca de 3 por 4,5 metros] and I cut around the bottle not knowing it was there. I can’t believe it,” he says.

“I was moving a radiator and I made a random hole to find the pipes and there it was, I don’t know how that happened.”

“I took it to the woman downstairs and said, ‘Look what I found under the floor.

Allan, owner of plumbing services business WF Wightman Plumbing, says the message is located below what should have been a maid’s room when the house was built.

Eilidh Stimpson, a mother of two, a doctor from Edinburgh, lives there with her husband.

She decided to wait for her 8- and 10-year-olds to get home from school before trying to get the note out of the bottle.

“When I picked them up from school I told them I had something really exciting and said ‘Are we going to have hot dogs for lunch?’ they said,” he said.

“They tried to guess a few more times and then I told them we had a message in a bottle in our house. They were so excited and thought it might be a treasure.”

When they got home, they tried desperately to pull out the note with tweezers and pliers, but the message began to tear.

Then Eilidh took a hammer and broke the bottle.

“We were all gathering around, holding flashlights to the message and trying to read, it was so exciting,” she says.

The note was signed and dated by two workers and read: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor but did not drink the whiskey. October 6, 1887.”

“Whoever finds this bottle might think our dust is flying on the road.”

save the ticket

“I feel so bad about breaking a 135-year-old bottle, but it was the only way to get the ticket. I kept all the pieces in Tupperware,” says the owner of the house.

Since the discovery Monday, 11/14, a family friend has studied the 1881 Census and found the names of men who lived a few miles away in Edinburgh’s Newington area.

Since then, a curator at the National Library of Scotland has advised the family to keep the note in an acid-free envelope.

“I ordered a couple of envelopes and eventually we’re going to frame a piece of the bottle as a neck to frame the note because it’s such an exciting and beautiful thing to have,” says Eilidh.

He claims they plan to put a bottle back in the hole before it closes, along with a new note written by the family and a copy of the original message.

“It’s unbelievable to think it’s been there all this time and could be there forever. It’s not just from the 1970s, it’s so much older, it’s really cool.”

– This text is published https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63691806