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.”

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