Tech History made on February 1, 1893.

On this day in 1893 the first film studio, the Black Maria, was opened by Thomas Edison in West Orange, New Jersey. The theater was also called the Kinetographic Theater after the Kinetograph, a forerunner to the video camera. The Black Maria was a not only a studio but was used to show the first films Edison made. One of the very first films was The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, not very exciting to us but it was quite the spectacle back then. The film was also called Fred Ott's Sneeze, which is what the film was, Fred Ott sneezing. The studio cost $637.67 to build and was purely a dark room covered in tar paper with a roof that retracted. Actors, acrobats and every kind of performer wanted to be recorded. While its popularity was short lived, the Kinetograph was profitable with theaters in 3 major cities. Thus modern cinema began....with a sneeze.