People around the world will be able to access thousands of hours of historical news film footage free with the online launch of Pathe's famous cinema newsreels.
The archive, which is believed to be the oldest in the world, has been put online for the first time and can be viewed for free at the British Pathe web site.
The material consists of almost 100,000 individual stories and the entire length of film could stretch from London to New York.
The 3,500 hours of footage took 50,000 hours to process into digital format and would take the average television viewer two-and-a-half years to watch.
To create the online video files the film material was cleaned and reassembled.
It was then encoded to the MPEG-2 digital broadcast standard and the masters were used to produce low-resolution preview files and high-resolution files for licensing.
The Pathe News film archive was founded in Paris by Charles Pathe in 1896 and moved to London in 1902. Generations of British people were kept informed by the bi-weekly news bulletins which played in cinemas from 1910 to 1970.
It covered many of the major events of the 20th Century, including the two World Wars, the great depression, the 1926 general strike and man walking on the moon for the first time.
The site contains 90,000 web pages split into 16 themed sections.
The sports section includes the famous footage of the 1966 World Cup and games like Knur and Spell. There are more than 300 FA Cup matches in the archive.
There is also a lucky dip button, which randomly selects 20 items for preview. This is designed for users who are not looking for anything specific but want to get an idea of the archive contents.
The advent of colour television resulted in the demise of the Pathe newsreels but the images are still extensively used in television, film and home video footage.
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell launched the new site after funding was made available from the Lottery's New Opportunities Fund.
She said: "National Lottery good cause funding has enabled British Pathe to bring about this world first, both in terms of technical achievement and in bringing 20th Century newsreel to the small screen of internet users of all ages."
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