From falling hemlines to Hitler's rise: yesterday's news makes history in the digital age

For five decades from 1910, the twice-weekly Pathe Gazette newsreels were the main way that British people saw what was happening in the world – put faces to the men who ruled them, saw the places friends and family were fighting in, put some flesh on the news. The sound of the crowing cockerel, the martial music, Bob Danvers-Walker's jauntily patrician tones – these were the soundtrack of history.

In the 21st century, it's hard to see how the Pathe website (britishpathe.com), launched yesterday by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, can fail. We seem to live in an amnesiac age, when the collective memory stretches back no more than a few years, even a few months. Why, last year, BBC2 broadcast a programme looking back fondly at the fads and fashions of 1999. Perhaps precisely because of a sense that the past is receding ever faster, the collective thirst for history has never been stronger: history books of one kind or another dominate the non-fiction best-seller lists, and TV documentaries about pharaohs and Tudor monarchs are guaranteed ratings-pullers.

When you try to put the first half of the 20th century into pictures –Chamberlain standing at the top of the aeroplane steps, waving his little piece of paper; the piles of bodies at Belsen, and the empty eyes of the survivors; the glow of a thousand suns and the swelling mushroom of smoke over Bikini Atoll – what you are remembering is, as likely as not, the way that Pathe showed it.

Now, all that raw history has been turned into convenience : using money from the National Lottery's New Opportunities Fund, Pathe has transferred its entire archive to a digital format, easily downloaded over the Web. Members of the public can search the archive using keywords (Chamberlain, Munich), then choose between downloading a low-resolution clip free, or paying £50 and getting a crystalline high-resolution version. For £18, you can even have your chosen clip transferred to videotape for viewing from the comfort of your armchair. That's the theory, anyway; predictably enough, yesterday's launch was marred by some technical glitches and the sheer pressure of public interest, as thousands logged on to get a personal window to the past.

The task of transferring all the film has been a heroic one. The newsreel ran for 60 years, finally killed off in 1970 by mass television ownership; and even before Pathe started the Gazette, its teams were out there filming the big events – the earliest footage in the archive dates back to 1896: out and about in London, with shots of horse-drawn traffic crossing Westminster Bridge, and a funfair (no record of where the funfair was: much of the oldest material was skimpily labelled). The first actual happening catalogued is the finish of the 1896 Derby (a little annoyingly, the winner is not identified; not that anybody is likely to be collecting on a betting slip, but it's nice to pin these things down).

Over those 74 years, the Pathe archive accumulated some 3,500 hours of news, made up of getting on for 100,000 items. The sheer slog of converting it all must have been horrendous enough. And the job is not without risks: most of this stuff is on nitrate film stock – notoriously unstable, liable to burst into flame at the slightest provocation, so it has to be kept in specially cooled vaults, equipped with safe, non-sparking light switches. Film archivists like to tell horror stories of exploding reels, of precious cinematic treasures reduced to glop inside their canisters; although some of the oldest stock in the Pathe archives had decayed, almost nothing of value has been lost – a piece of luck that is astounding enough by itself.

And nothing has been omitted from the website, however trifling. It wasn't all heavy stuff, wars, rumours of wars, etc: as well as the twice-weekly news, Pathe produced a series of weekly "cine-magazines": general features Pathe Pictorial, Eve's Film Review – a women's magazine, featuring women's sports and the latest from the catwalks – and Pathetones, an entertainment magazine. You can download the first moving images of Hitler the British public saw, or the assassination of JFK; or you see Arthur Askey performing "The Bee Song".

There are also landmarks of different sorts: sports fans can watch Donald Bradman fending off Harold Larwood's bodyline attack and sigh for the days when Australian cricket quailed before the might of England.

Alternatively, they can comfort themselves with the notion that the good old days weren't as good as all that: a newsreel from 1947 carries the alarming headline "What's Wrong with British Sport?", while in 1949 the question was "Can British cricket regain its old glory?" (interesting that it wasn't English cricket back then – or perhaps that was just when it was going badly). You can see Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile at Iffley Road; or Bobby Moore holding the Jules Rimet trophy aloft in 1966, assuming you aren't heartily sick of reliving the World Cup triumph.

One attraction of the website is, perversely, that the new technology allows you access to an age when news wasn't on radio, on TV, in newspapers, on the hour every hour and breaking in between. News came more slowly, and the clunking technology enforced a decent reticence: the only footage to accompany the sinking of the Titanic was silent shots of anxious relatives crowding outside the White Star offices; and then a few shots of the survivors as they came ashore.

Interestingly, what purported to be footage of the Titanic itself has turned out, after exhaustive research, to be no such thing – probably the sister ship, Olympia. There was no sound for the first 20 years – even after feature films had gone over to talkies – haste and the need for portability kept Pathe silent; when sound did come, it was usually in the form of a commentary, though occasionally a real person would be heard in interview.

But technology alone doesn't account for the decorum newsreel offers. Even a confirmed republican has to admit to finding some relief in the quiet dignity with which the passing of kings and the anointing of their successors was marked: one of the early pieces shows Victoria's coffin being carried through Cowes on a gun-carriage; you can see (though not hear) warships firing off a final salute as it is taken to the mainland.

At the other end of the archive, the last big piece of royal ceremonial is the investiture of the young Charles as Prince of Wales – such a sweet boy, who'd have thought it?

In between, all the whole of the past century, horrifying absurd and occasionally entertaining, is laid out for us here. If that doesn't quench our thirst for the past, what will?