Boxing was on the ancient Olympic programme in 688 BC, with no rounds or weight classes
the gist
Hitting with fists is as old as wrestling, and the earliest visual evidence of boxing is in Mesopotamian reliefs from the end of the 4th millennium BC. Ancient Greek boxing entered the Olympics in 688 BC; fighters wrapped their hands in leather, and bouts ran until someone gave up, with no rounds or weight divisions. Romans later hardened the wraps into the cestus, a metal-studded weapon. Fist fighting faded in Western Europe after Rome fell, then returned as bare-knuckle prizefighting in England, where the Broughton Rules of 1743 introduced a 30-second count to protect fighters. The Queensberry rules of 1867 set out the framework behind modern boxing.
so what
The shift from fights that lasted until surrender to timed rounds and weight classes is the core of modern boxing safety. Each rule change was made to protect fighters from the chaos of earlier contests.
fun fact
The first recorded boxing match in Britain, in 1681, was arranged by a duke who pitted his butler against his butcher.
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Photo: Royal Navy official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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