The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is a collection of 19 astronomical instruments built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh and completed in 1734. The instruments are built from stone and marble and work without lenses, so astronomers observe positions with the naked eye. The Vrihat Samrat Yantra is a 27-metre sundial, one of the largest in the world, whose angled face matches Jaipur's latitude. Other instruments measure declination, altitude and azimuth, track the pole star, and calculate the Sun's movement across the sky. Jai Singh built the observatory because the Zij tables used for predicting celestial positions were inaccurate, and his own tables were used in India for about a century.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.