Fred Ott's Sneeze wasn't the first copyrighted movie. In 2022, scholar Claudy Op den Kamp found an Edison film registered in 1893 that beat it.

The famous 1894 clip of a man sneezing was the second American film ever copyrighted, not the first — a distinction that stood uncorrected until 2022.

For more than a century, Fred Ott's Sneeze — a few seconds of an Edison employee tipping back his head and letting one fly — carried the title of the first copyrighted motion picture in the United States. It wasn't. In 2022, film scholar Claudy Op den Kamp identified an earlier Edison film, *The Blacksmith Shop*, whose copyright registration predates the Sneeze by a matter of months, landing in 1893. The Sneeze was registered on January 9, 1894. So it came second.

That correction sounds like pedantry until you notice how neatly the old story had calcified. Fred Ott's Sneeze is vivid, funny, and survives as a watchable strip of film, so it became shorthand for "the beginning of movies." Being memorable is not the same as being first.

Why did we get the record wrong for so long?

The confusion is baked into how early film was filed. There was no category for "motion picture" at the copyright office in the 1890s, because the medium barely existed as a legal object. So Edison's people registered their moving images as photographs. Fred Ott's Sneeze went in not as a film but as a series of still frames — a paper contact print of the sequence — which is why the surviving artifact people cite is a strip of photographs rather than a reel.

Because everything was catalogued under photographs, sorting out which registration was truly the earliest *film* required someone to go back through the paperwork and read it as motion-picture history rather than as still images. Op den Kamp did that work, and the Library of Congress announced her finding in 2022 under the plainly titled release, "Scholar at the Library of Congress Identifies the First Motion Picture Ever Copyrighted." The WIPO Magazine wrote it up the same year, stating flatly that the first copyrighted motion picture was Edison's *The Blacksmith Shop* and the second, registered January 9, 1894, was the one everyone calls Fred Ott's Sneeze.

So what is Fred Ott's Sneeze actually the first of?

Here's the wrinkle that keeps the old claim half-alive. *The Blacksmith Shop* won the registration race, but no print of it is known to survive. Fred Ott's Sneeze does survive. That gives it a real, defensible title, and the Library of Congress states it precisely in its own catalog record for the "Edison kinetoscopic record of a sneeze": it is "the earliest surviving motion picture registered for copyright at the Library of Congress, received on January 9, 1894." Earliest *surviving* copyrighted film — not the first copyrighted film. The catalog even notes two associated registration numbers, 44732 from 1893 and 2887 from January 9, 1894, a paper trail that shows how tangled the early filings were.

The concrete detail worth holding onto is the sneeze itself. The subject was Fred Ott, an Edison lab machinist known around the shop for his showy sneezes, and the film was made partly to illustrate an article on Edison's kinetoscope. He takes a pinch of something, winds up, and lets go — a bodily reflex turned into one of the first performances ever committed to celluloid, precisely because it was small, repeatable, and reliably funny.

The part still open to argument is what "first" should even mean. Wikipedia has described the Sneeze as the "second oldest surviving" film, which is imprecise and, given the Library's own wording, close to self-contradictory: if the truly first-copyrighted film has no surviving print, then the Sneeze is simultaneously the second film copyrighted and the earliest one that survives. Both facts are true; the tidy headline that squeezes them into a single superlative is what fails. Which title you hand Fred Ott — earliest surviving, or second registered — depends entirely on whether you're counting what was filed or what was kept.