A: Sure, you might know that washed up bottles once were a technique used by spies to drop notes to one another. Or that, because of this, Queen Elizabeth I actually made it a capital offense for British citizens to open up sealed bottles that washed up on shore (in fact only one man, whom she appointed the "Official Uncorker" could do that). But the great message in a bottle we're talking about is far less undercover.

As the only heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, Daisy Singer Alexander was an eccentric woman who enjoyed dropping bottles with messages inside into the River Thames. In June of 1937, Alexander wrote a note reading, "To avoid all confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle," sealed it, and threw it into the river. Singer died in 1940. In 1949, a San Francisco dishwasher named Jack Wrum was walking along the beach and happened across a sealed bottle. As a result of the note inside, he inherited eight million dollars.