The Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing machine first shown in 1770 by its builder Wolfgang von Kempelen, who wanted to impress Empress Maria Theresa. It appeared to play chess on its own, but a skilled operator sat hidden in a compartment beneath the board and moved the pieces using levers and magnets. The machine won most of its games, including against Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, and toured for 84 years under later owners who kept the secret. Its operators during the later tour included several strong chess masters. In 1857 an article by the owner's son gave the first full description of the mechanism, and the machine itself had been destroyed in a fire in 1854.

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.