Looking back...
It’s hard to believe that just a century ago, YouTube was a fledgling video site for paupers and presidents alike. Today, we celebrate 100 years of YouTube, and we thought we would reflect on our inaugural year with a re-print of our first blog post from 1911. In honor of this milestone, today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago. Check out some of the most popular videos of the time and be sure to try out our new upload mode which summons a horse-drawn carriage to pick up your video submission from your home. Here’s to another epoch of great video!
April 1911
Editor’s note: Welcome to YouTube! Today we’re honored to have President William Howard Taft as our guest blogger to celebrate our official site launch.
Ladies and gentlemen of these United States. We are living in an age in which, by exaggeration of the defects of our present condition, by false charges and responsibility for it against individuals and classes, by holding up to the feverish imagination of the less fortunate and the discontented the possibilities of a millennium, a condition of popular unrest has been produced.
Due to advancements in modern technology and the advent of the Edison kinetoscope, there is hope. And I venture to say that there is no other destination on the web which has taken more real steps of such progress than the YouTubes, making its debut today. Here, instantaneous expression of the people may be upheld. Great feats of strength may be honored! Here, industry may thrive and cinema appreciated in its rightful form.
I should be untrue to myself, to my promises, and to the declarations of the party platform upon which I was elected to office, if the incoming Congress is not aware of the importance of boxing cat videos and our shared human moments of folly. We should encourage this in every way feasible.
It is a very enterprising time in America. The Pedro Miguel Locks have just been completed as part of the Panama Canal, there are Nobel Prize rumors circulating around regarding Ms. Curie’s so-called “radium discovery”, and J.P. Morgan is building a steamship they say is unsinkable. Very enterprising times, indeed. One can only imagine what events will be recorded for all the world to see.