Deaf communities have used sign languages for centuries, and one of the earliest written mentions is from the fifth century BC, in Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates imagines people using hand signs if they had no voice. Most pre-19th-century records are not of the languages themselves but of manual alphabets, invented to map spoken words onto the hands. In 1620 Juan Pablo Bonet published a manual alphabet and an oral teaching method in Madrid, and in 1755 Abbé de l'Épée founded the first school for deaf children in Paris. His manual alphabet largely survived in France and North America, and his pupil Laurent Clerc helped found the American School for the Deaf in 1817.

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.