This Yesterday’s Newsreel film (episode 135) offers the viewer “television highlights of the news of yesteryear” by providing vintage clips of famous people and events from the first half of the 20th century. The episode begins with a look at the development of long-distance submarines. A submarine cruiser sits on scaffolding in a drydock (00:47). Frances Lovering Adams, wife of Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams, christens the submarine. A V-5 is out at sea. Navy crews work inside a long-distance submarine in 1950. A submarine cruises just below the surface of the water. A submarine crew engages in a war training, shooting a torpedo at a ship. The USS Pickerel sits at Pearl Harbor (02:55) after arriving from Hong Kong. Its crew stand on top of the submarine. In “Strong Men,” 16-year-old Harry Luck shows off his strength in New York City in 1926, bending pipe and ripping up a phone buck. In San Francisco, another strong man attempts to tear up a phone book but fails. The next segment shows Italians going to the bank to deposit money as part of Benito Mussolini’s plan to repay Italy’s war loan from the U.S. The “Personalities” segment features former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo putting up posters for Near East relief (05:50), Alma Gluck arriving back in the U.S. to perform her songs, and Charles Ray and his wife visiting New York City (06:40). “Ohio River Overflows” shows the January 1927 flood at Newport, KY. People use boats to get around. A horse-drawn wagon maneuvers through the flooded streets. The next segment shows the Eiffel Tower as it is lit up at night (08:10), and the segment after that takes viewers to Culver’s Lake, NJ where a pastor preaches from a floating pulpit to a congregation sitting in canoes (08:58). “Aviation” features a police officer standing on the wing of a plane in flight “pulling over” another plane for some sort of violation. In “Fashions of the Day,” viewers see clips of a 1926 New York fashion show held among blooming flowers. The final segment, “Sports,” presents footage of Australia’s Pete McClaren chopping wood in Boston; slow motion footage shows the wood-cutting champion chopping a log. At the 1925 Lexington running of the Kentucky Futurity, a large crowd watches as Aileen Guy wins the race.

Motion picture films don’t last forever; many have already been lost or destroyed. For almost two decades, we’ve worked to collect, scan and preserve the world as it was captured on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm movies — including home movies, industrial films, and other non-fiction. If you have endangered films you’d like to have scanned, or wish to donate celluloid to Periscope Film so that we can share them with the world, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us via the weblink below.

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com