The Truth About YouTube's First Ever Video
World-changing technology is often heralded by a humble, unextraordinary first step. The first telephone call, made by Alexander Graham Bell on March 10th, 1876, transmitted the words "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you," proving that from the very beginning, man has preferred not to talk on the phone. The first Facebook post, now lost to time, read something like "thinking of getting off Facebook for a while, message me your # if you want to talk."
And the beginnings of YouTube were equally unspectacular. Nigh-on impossible though it may be to imagine today, there was a time when the now-peerless video streaming site had only one video available. Even more difficult to comprehend, it didn't feature a single cat.
It all started on April 23rd, 2005, with an 18 second video posted by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. It was called "Me at the zoo." It's still available to watch, the only video posted to the channel.
It is must see TV.
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We'll go through this one moment at a time.
The video opens. Karim is seen and heard, standing in front of the elephant pen at California's beautiful San Diego Zoo. "All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants," Karim says, and you know what? He is. He is in front of the elephants. He continues "and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks," which is, undeniably, the cool thing about those guys.
In conclusion, Karim states "and that's, that's cool, and that's pretty much all there is to say." In the background, one pachyderm has straw all over its head. That's it. That's everything.
From this staggering first step, YouTube quickly became the go-to site for streaming video. A year after "Me at the zoo" was published, the site sold to Google for a reported $1.65 billion, according to CNN.
And that's pretty much all there is to say.