London Museum Acquires YouTube's Very First Video

Before YouTube turned everyone with a phone into a videographer, it started with one shaky clip about elephants. London's Victoria and Albert Museum has added "Me at the Zoo"—the first video ever uploaded to YouTube—to its collection, along with a painstaking reconstruction of the site's early look, reports Smithsonian. The 19-second video, posted by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005, shows him at the San Diego Zoo noting that elephants have "really, really, really long trunks." The clip has since pulled in more than 380 million views.

To display it as it originally appeared, V&A curators worked with YouTube and design studio Oio over 18 months, using code preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. They rebuilt the 2005-era watch page, Flash player and all—even down to period banner ads that ran in late 2006 and early 2007. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan tells PA Media that the result is a way to "step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon." The exhibit, in the museum's Design 1900—Now gallery, anchors a story that quickly accelerated: By the end of 2005, YouTube was serving millions of daily views, and by late 2006 it was part of Google, in a $1.6 billion deal. More here from the V&A on its newest acquisition.