It's the old wet-chemistry pedant in me speaking, but I think what the BBC meant was that the photographs were printed for the first time. It's aeronautically irrelevant, but it would be a bfd if negatives were successfully developed after a century.
Kids these days, probably never even taken a roll into a 1-hour d&p joint, no respect, even taken away the 3.5mm stereo socket, life comes with no magenta line, ....