During the first week of January 1894, a five-second film starring an Edison technician was shot at the Black Maria; Fred Ott's Sneeze, as it is now widely known, was made expressly to produce a sequence of images for an article in Harper's magazine.
In 1906 it was used as a location by Biograph for Holdup of the Rocky Mountain Express, an early nickelodeon film shot on paper, since transferred to film by the Library of Congress.
During the 1904 federal election he used his kinetoscope to project election results on to the front wall of the newspaper La Patrie and in 1906 turned an abandoned cabaret house into a nickelodeon of 500 seats.
In late 1894 or early 1895, Dickson became an ad hoc advisor to the motion picture operation of the Latham brothers, Otway and Grey, and their father, Woodville, who ran one of the leading Kinetoscope exhibition companies.