The Yamato-class battleships were two ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Yamato and Musashi, and they were the heaviest warships ever built. Laid down in 1937 and 1938 and commissioned in 1941 and 1942, they displaced nearly 72,000 long tons at full load. Each carried nine 460 mm guns, the largest naval artillery ever fitted to a warship, capable of firing shells over 42 km. Because of the threat from US submarines and carriers, they spent most of their careers in bases such as Truk and Kure. Musashi was sunk by air strikes at Leyte Gulf in 1944, and Yamato was destroyed by aircraft in April 1945 while heading toward Okinawa.

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.