Soon, with Dickson and William Heise in charge of the motion-picture production, Edison's studio began releasing an increasing variety of full-length (in 1894 that meant less than a minute) films. The first copyrighted product, a would-be comical clip that showed Fred Ott, an Edison employee, sneezing into a handkerchief, was followed by pictures of an amateur gymnast, of a lightning shave in a barbershop, and of Eugene Sandow, an Austrian strong man, flexing his upper torso. Nearly 80 pictures were made in 1894, and they included wrestlers, cock fights, terriers attacking rats, Buffalo Bill and Indian war council, and the gyrations of skimpily dressed dancers. Comparisons of some leading subjects of mainstream U.S. filmmaking a century later are unavoidable: wrestling, violence, Westerns, sex, even another muscle-displaying Austrian (Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course.)

—Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century