Colour photography wasn’t available up until 1970, so some of the most historical photos of all time are, quite understandably, in black and white. But thanks to the process of digital colourisation, some of these iconic photos have been transformed from black and white into glorious technicolour!

There is something magical in seeing B/W photos in colour, it makes our past look so vivid yet surreal. From the famous 1945 Times Square kiss to the first ever nuclear weapons test conducted by the US, these striking coloured images will make you see past in new light!

1) Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo of a sailor kissing a nurse on ‘V-J Day’ in Times Square (1945).

2) U.S. Marines Raising the American flag during the 1945 battle of Iwo Jima.

3) Sergeant George Camblair learning how to use a gas mask during a practice smokescreen at Fort Belvoir, Virginia in 1942.

4) A group of men inside one of the Hoover Dam turbines in the early 1930s while it was being built.

5) A Vietcong Guerrilla being executed in 1968 during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive. Photographer Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for this iconic photo.

6) This photo shows two men testing out a bulletproof vest in Washington, D.C. (1932)

7) This was taken during the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937. People lining up to seek clothing and food from a Kentucky relief station.

8) The last living photo of American president Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

9) This image is of an unemployed lumber worker along with his wife at the bean harvest in August of 1939. It also shows the Oregon man’s arm tattoo of his Social Security number.

10) Seen below is famous English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic Eric Arthur Blair who used the pen name George Orwell.

11) A model floating in the water at Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida. This image was published in Harper’s Bazaar in December 1947.

12) A Buddhist monk burns himself to death on a Saigon street to protest persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.

13) The iconic laughing photo of Albert Einstein snapped at a Princeton University luncheon in 1953.

14) Photo of Samuel Langhorne Clemens better known as Mark Twain seen relaxing in a garden.

15) Florence Owens Thompson and her children in Nipomo, California in 1936.

16) Mauretania’s first Chief Engineer, John Currie, and other gentlemen in 1909 at the Canada Dock, Liverpool.

17) The legendary artist Salvador Dali with his ocelot and his cane photographed in 1965.

18) The most successful film-maker and comic actor of the silent film era—Charlie Chaplin.

19) A nuclear weapon test being conducted by the United States in 1946 at Bikin Atoll. Operation Crossroads became the first nuclear weapons to be detonated since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.

20) This image shows participants of the invitation-only Solvay Conference, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. This was in 1927.

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