Fred Ott's Sneeze

Fred Ott's Sneeze
The full film
Directed byWilliam K.L. Dickson
Produced byWilliam K.L. Dickson
StarringFred Ott
Distributed byEdison Manufacturing Company
Release date
  • January 9, 1894 (1894-01-09)
Running time
approximately 5 seconds
CountryUnited States
LanguageSilent

Fred Ott's Sneeze (also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze) is an 1894 short, black-and-white silent film shot by William K.L. Dickson and featuring Fred Ott. According to the Library of Congress, it is the second oldest surviving U.S. motion picture to be copyrighted, although it is now in the public domain.

In the approximately five-second film, which was shot in January 1894, one of Thomas Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress, the film was "made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly." The published Harper's Weekly version is slightly longer than what now survives on film, and depicts a second sneeze.

In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."