For most of history people wiped with whatever was to hand, and in 18th-century Britain that often meant recycled newspaper. Victorian toilet paper was sold in hard, medicated forms like Izal, which was treated with disinfectant. In 1956 Izal's maker asked the Tavistock Institute to test whether Britons would switch to soft tissue, and more than 400 interviews found the market was softening at different speeds in different cities. Women and young couples moved first, while Glaswegians still used newspaper and Yorkshire shoppers distrusted soft paper as unreliable. The British civil service then decided in 1970 not to adopt soft paper, because a hygiene study argued that soft tissue left fingers too close to faeces.

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.