A video feast for the eyes

There's great news for history and video buffs.  British Pathé has uploaded its entire library of historic 'moving images' to YouTube.  The Telegraph reports:

The archive of 3,500 hours of footage was digitised in 2002 thanks in part to a grant from the National Lottery, and is now freely accessible to anyone around the world for free.

The unique collection of video covers major events, famous faces, travel, sport and culture and is a wealth of information on the First and Second World Wars in particular.

Scrolling through the archives reveals everything from the tragic: Emily Davison throwing herself under the King's horse, the Hindenburg disaster and the Hiroshima bombing, to the downright unusual, such as Southampton University's 1962 attempt to launch a flying bicycle.

Founded in Paris in 1896, Pathé launched in Britain 14 years later. It single-handedly invented the modern television news format but ceased recording in 1970. After that it was sold several times, at one point to EMI, but launched as an independent archive in 2009. Two years later it opened a YouTube channel and has today announced the final step in digitising and uploading its entire collection to Google's video sharing platform.

There's more at the link.

I clicked over to British Pathé's YouTube channel, and was amazed by the variety of clips they offer.  Here are three, in no particular order of importance.  First, suffragette Emily Davison throws herself beneath the hooves of the King's horse in 1913 (she died of her injuries four days later).

Next, the world's first helicopters - described by Pathé as "The Good, The Bad and The Sheer Dangerous!"

Last but by no means least, the sinking and explosion of the battleship HMS Barham in 1941 after being torpedoed by a German submarine in the Mediterranean.

There are many more videos at the link.  I can see I'm going to spend hours going through them.

Peter