If you cannot play this movie you will need to enable or install Macromedia's FLASH PLAYER software in your Browser. To download a free version of FLASH, click on the following "Download Center" link:
Courtesy of The Library of Congress:
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division
The Earliest Complete Film on Record
&
The First Film Ever Submitted for Copyright
TITLE: Fred Ott's Sneeze / Edison's Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze
CREATED/PUBLISHED: United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1894.
SUMMARY: Film made for publicity purposes, as a series of sequential still photographs to accompany an article in "Harper's Weekly" (24 March 1894).
NOTES:
Copyright: William K. L. Dickson;
9 January 1894
Producer: W.K.L Dickson
Performer: Fred Ott.
Camera: William Heise.
Duration: 0:05 at 16 fps.
Filmed: c. Jan 2-7, 1894, Edison's Black Maria studio, West Orange, NJ.
Excerpt from the "Harper's Weekly" article:
The Edison kinetoscope gives the entire record of a sneeze from the first taking of a pinch of snuff to the recovery. As seen in this wonderful mechanical device of Mr. Edison's invention, when he exhibits the series of photographs the figure actually sneezes, and the phonograph as an accompanist sounds the precise "as–shew". The illusion is so perfect that you involuntarily say, "Bless you!" Looking at the eighty–one prints taken in about two seconds – or, to be exactly correct, forty pictures to the second – the gradual changes are seen.
