Scandal, weird animals, political incompetence and strike. The list reads like a normal November day in 2011, but they're just some of the headlines captured by the new digitisation project from the British Library that puts historical newspapers online.
More than four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries are available online from today in The British Newspaper Archive. Ed King, head of newspapers at the library, calls "a digital Aladdin's Cave" for researchers.
Workers at the library's North London base have been scanning 8,000 pages a day from the library's vast archive to assemble the digital collection.
The scanners have been working for over a year and there are plans to digitise 40 million more pages over the next decade. That's 13 years work at a start.
Highlights of the archive include the Tempus Prognosticator – a leech-powered tool for predicting approaching storms, which went on display at the great exhibition at Crystal Palace.
Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, said: “The British Newspaper Archive is a rich and hugely exciting resource, packed with historical detail. It’s a great example of the public and private sectors collaborating to deliver something that neither party could have delivered by themselves."
It's thought that family history hunters will find the archive particularly useful. A quick search for the term "Huffington" yields ten pages of results.
Papers scanned include the London Daily News, Glasgow Herald, Aberdeen Journal, Belfast Newsletter, Western Mail and Manchester Evening News.
The archive is the result of a ten-year partnership between the British Library and brightsolid, announced in May 2010. It is free to search, but you will need to pay to download your finds.
Start your search at BritishNewspaperArchive.