YouTube is officially 21, and its very first video, “Me at the zoo,” just landed a permanent spot at one of the world’s most prestigious museums!
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London has officially acquired the 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim hanging out with elephants in 2005.
This wasn’t just a simple file transfer. The V&A’s digital team spent 18 months reconstructing the entire YouTube experience from December 8, 2006—the oldest timestamp they could find. Because the original Adobe Flash Player is now obsolete, the team had to use an emulator called Ruffle to make the video playable. They even installed lower-resolution screens in the gallery and used a browser extension to recreate the “chunkier” buttons and scroll bars of the era so it looks exactly as it did in the mid-2000s.
Since it was uploaded on April 23, 2005, the video has racked up over 382 million views. The acquisition includes the original front-end code, the video file itself, and even long-forgotten banner ads from 2006 that were found in YouTube’s archives.
It’s now on display in the “Design 1900–Now” gallery, sitting alongside other modern design artifacts like the original iPhone and the mosquito emoji.
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