Riding waves is as old as swimming, but standing up on a board is a Polynesian innovation. Modern surfing traces back to Hawaii, where Polynesian settlers arriving from Tahiti and the Marquesas around the fifth century brought surfing customs and paipo belly boards. Hawaiians later developed the art of standing upright on boards. Similar riding was also recorded in Peru, where fishermen used reed craft around 200 CE, and in West and Central Africa, where children were taught to swim on boards in the 1600s. The sport declined in Hawaii in the late 1800s until George Freeth, of English and Native Hawaiian descent, revived it at Waikiki and brought surfing exhibitions to California in 1907. Duke Kahanamoku then spread it to the US mainland and Australia.

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.