Laika was a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow who became the first animal to orbit the Earth. She flew aboard the Soviet Sputnik 2 spacecraft, launched on 3 November 1957. Engineers had not developed a way to bring a capsule back from orbit, so her survival was never expected. The mission aimed to test whether a living creature could survive launch and function in weakened gravity and increased radiation, providing early data on the biological effects of spaceflight. Her death came hours into the flight, on about the fourth orbit. The Soviet government initially claimed she had been euthanised, but the true cause, a likely overheating caused by a failure of the rocket to separate from the payload, was not made public until 2002. Later Soviet missions returned dogs safely from orbit in 1960.

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.