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"The tar-papered Black Maria was the color of a police paddy wagon, hence its nickname. It was even painted black on the inside. Part of its roof opened on hinges to allow the sun to shine upon the shooting stage. Sunlight was the only light source strong enough to register an image on the slow film emulsion of the day. If the sun happened to be on an inconvenient side of the Black Maria, the building was simply rotated on casters to face in the proper direction."



"Ironically, the earliest surviving paper print submitted to the Library of Congress by Edison was not intended to be shown in the Kinetoscope. This was a five-second snippet entitled the “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze,” or better known as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.” Ott was an Edison employee who amused his co-workers with outrageous exhibitions of comic sneezing and Heise put the resident clown to work. “Harper’s Weekly” needed a series of picture of someone sneezing, so Heise filmed Ott expectorating in front of The Doghouse and chose the best frames for publication."


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