YouTube goes back to 1911 for April Fools' Day

Its videos were overlaid with a sepia tone and piano soundtracks accompanied the clips.

The video site also revealed the five most popular “viral pictures” of 1911, including Flugelhorn Feline, a previously unknown precursor to Keyboard Cat.

Announcing the makeover on its blog, YouTube wrote: “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 honour of this milestone, today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago.”

Google, which owns YouTube, has a long tradition of April Fools' pranks. Last year the company claimed that it would allow users to upload physical objects, including keys and remote controls, to Google Docs. In 2009, Google Mobile promised search results if the user held the phone to their forehead and thought about their search.

The company’s most famous April Fools’ Day hoax is perhaps the 2004 prank which advertised jobs on a planned Google research centre on the moon.

Other pranks from Google this year include Gmail Motion - a motion-control system for email - Google Chromercise, which promised to tone people’s hands while they browsed the web, and a Google search joke that delivered results in the Comic Sans font if a user searched for “Helvetica” or “Comic Sans”.

Conversely, Gmail, now one of Google’s most successful products, was thought to be a joke when it was announced on April 1, 2004.