Seat belts were sketched by English engineer George Cayley for his gliders in the mid-19th century, but carmakers only began offering them in cars in 1949. Buyers largely refused them: Nash fitted about 40,000 cars, yet only 1,000 belts had been used a year later. Safety thinking came from a neurologist's study of head injuries and from Swedish engineering. Volvo introduced Nils Bohlin's three-point belt as standard in 1959, backed by a study of 28,000 Swedish crashes where no belted occupant died below 60 mph if the cabin stayed intact. Compulsory laws followed, starting in Victoria, Australia, in 1970.

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.