On the evening of 9 November 1965, a power failure spread across much of the northeastern United States and parts of Ontario, leaving about 30 million people without electricity for up to 13 hours. The grid had been designed to link utilities so they could help each other, but that also meant a fault could spread. The investigation traced it to a protective relay at a power station in Ontario that had been set too low, so it tripped when normal power was flowing. The load shifted to other lines, which then overloaded and tripped in a chain. The event became a classic case of a cascading failure in an interconnected system.

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.