A million minutes of historic current-affairs footage from 1895 to the present day becomes available on video-sharing website

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

One million minutes of historical video dating back to 1895 – from footage of a hover scooter floating on a cushion of air to Mussolini calling for world peace – have been uploaded onto YouTube.

In what is the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date, the Associated Press and British Movietone are to host a collection of 550,000 video stories on two YouTube channels.

The digitised archival footage includes coverage of political milestones and historical moments in sport, fashion, science and entertainment.

The channels will be continually refreshed with up-to-date contemporary footage, according to AP, offering a “view-on-demand visual encyclopedia”.



From grainy black-and-white newsreel clips of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, to more modern high-definition video of Taylor Swift “shaking it off” at Madame Tussauds alongside her new waxwork, it could take around two years to watch all of the footage.



Here is a tiny selection from the vast archive:

(1) Nelson Mandela released after 27 years in prison

The video shows Mandela taking his first steps as a free man after 27 years in prison in South Africa, and the crowds of wellwishers who were there to see him released.

(2) Marilyn Monroe marries Joe Di Maggio, 1954

The marriage of the film star and baseball hero DiMaggio drew a record crowd to a San Francisco court. Photographers took pictures of the happy couple and of Marilyn and Joe kissing, and as the groom drove their wedding car away.

(3) A man stands in front of tank in Tiananmen Square, 1989

Footage of the demonstrations in Beijing on 3 June 1989 includes the famous video of the man who stood in front of a tank in protest.

(4) Report on the assassination of Martin Luther King, 1968

The killing of King was a tragic blow to the US civil rights campaign. This Movietone package shows footage of the “American Gandhi” and recalls the summers of race rioting that he sought to quell.

(5) Fancy Sunglasses, 1971

The French always seem to be the first to come up with something bizarre in the fashion field, says the AP archive caption, “but when it comes to sunglasses – they really excel.” The designs include elephant glasses, nuts-and-bolts glasses, tennis glasses, bicycle glasses, pearl glasses and even brandy glasses. Très chic!

(6) The two-faced cat, 2011

Frank and Louie, from Worcester, Massachusetts, entered the record books when he became the longest-living cat with two faces, also known as a Janus cat.

7) Aftermath of typhoon disaster, East Pakistan, 1970

Harrowing pictures, including footage of dead bodies, show viewers the carnage wreaked by the Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Despite the worldwide relief effort, many survivors, the report says, are still near to starvation. This was taken a year before the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence.

(8) The Great Train Robbery – inside Durham prison

Rare footage taken inside the maximum security wing of Durham prison, where three of the Great Train Robbers were held. The video shows a warden walking along a catwalk outside cells and prisoners sewing mailbags.

(9) Dog-walking machines, 1937

“Very often it’s the owner what leads a dog’s life,” says the voiceover, as he introduces a contraption to make the dogs think they are really running, “so the inventor of this little gadget deserves to be the benefactor of the human race.” The home exercises for Fido and Rover seem a bit of “all right”, while others seem to think they are going up the down escalator.

(10) Footage of Mount Vesuvius erupting, 1938

A report from 1938 shows Mount Vesuvius erupting, in which the title proclaims: “First pictures in sound of boiling lava within the crater of a volcano.”

(11) The Berlin Wall comes down, 1989

The video shows a bulldozer and demolition crane removing the top sections of the wall that divided Berlin between 1961 and 1989, while crowds cheer and shout.

(12) Obama’s image features on one of Russia’s most famous souvenirs, 2009

This footage shows a close-up of Barack Obama, then recently elected as US president, being painted on a matryoshka nested doll. It also includes interviews with Russians and their views on the new administration.

(13) Iraq declares official holiday due to heatwave, 2015

Modern footage from Iraq on the day that the country’s government announced there would be an official holiday due to a scorching heatwave. Temperatures that day had exceeded over 50C in some provinces.

(14) President Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, 1963

Film of JFK delivered the famous lines “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was quivest romanius somum, today the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.”