The first copyrighted film was a five-second motion picture of a sneeze. The 1894 silent film, directed by William K.L. Dickson, was created by Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope and simply titled Fred Ott’s Sneeze.
Fred Ott was one of Edison’s assistants and had a tendency to launch loud sneezes. As Edison experimented with his new machine, he recruited Ott to perform in front of the lens.
As recalled in a 1908 article, “He protested at first, but was compelled to yield, and by some means or other, known only to himself, was able to go through all the grimaces of a real bona-fide sneeze while the camera clicked away at the rate of fifty pictures to the second.”
Copyright laws didn’t have provisions for films until 1912, so Edison and other producers submitted contact prints showing each frame.
In 2015, the Library of Congress selected Fred Ott’s Sneeze for entry into National Film Registry, along with Ghostbusters and The Shawshank Redemption and Top Gun.
Ott also starred in Fred Ott Holding a Bird (also 1894) and The Kiss (1900) — both of which portrayed exactly what the titles suggest.
Take five seconds and watch Fred Ott’s famous sneeze below.
