8 Fascinating Newsreels From A Giant Treasure Trove Now On YouTube

8 Fascinating Newsreels From A Giant Treasure Trove Now On YouTube

Today, newsreels seem like a thing of the past — an outmoded medium that feels ancient in comparison to the way we consumer media today. But they dominated much of the 20th century, and now the AP and British Movietone have uploaded more than one million minutes of them to YouTube.

The new upload contains 550,000 videos dating back to 1895, spread across the two organisations’ YouTube channels. On British Movietone you’ll find an enormous amount of early 20th-century material, while the AP’s channel spans more than the full century, including plenty of colour footage and semi-recent current events. “At AP we are always astonished at the sheer breadth of footage that we have access to, and the upload to YouTube means that, for the first time, the public can enjoy some of the oldest and most remarkable moments in history,” the AP’s director of international archive, Alwyn Lindsey, said in a statement.

Browsing thought them would take hours, but those would be hours well-spent — here are a few interesting moments we found while browsing today.

[Associated Press on YouTube; British Movietone on YouTube]


An atom bomb test at Yucca Flats in Nevada

Mao and Nixon meeting in 1972

The aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake

NASA preparing the Apollo 11 lander for flight

The Victory Parade in London after World War II

Street scenes from Tokyo in 1972

An early “driverless” car from 1971

Vesuvius erupting in 1938


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.