Leslie Richard Groves Jr. was an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers who oversaw the building of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project. He was appointed in 1941 to create the huge office complex for the War Department, which became the Pentagon. In September 1942 he took charge of the Manhattan Project, the secret programme that built the atomic bomb. He oversaw construction at sites including Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford, made decisions on isotope separation, and helped select the Japanese cities that were targeted. He kept the project under tight security, though spies were still able to pass secrets to the Soviet Union. After the war, he headed the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project before retiring in 1948, and his service was recognised by an act of Congress that backdated his promotion to the date of the Trinity test.

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.