A tesseract is a four-dimensional cube, built the way a cube is built from a square: a square has four sides, a cube has six square faces, and a tesseract has eight cube-shaped faces. Since we live in three dimensions, we can only see it through diagrams or projections, which flatten it into three dimensions. The British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton coined the word in 1888, and his 1904 book The Fourth Dimension used coloured diagrams to help readers picture it. Hinton's ideas were speculative, but they prepared the ground for the real breakthrough. In 1908 Hermann Minkowski treated time as a fourth dimension alongside space, which gave rise to the concept of spacetime that Einstein's relativity relies on.

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.