BlackBerry began at Research in Motion in Waterloo, Ontario, which first made two-way pagers in the late 1990s. The first device to carry the BlackBerry name, the 850, arrived in 1999 and was the first to integrate email. The company focused on email, delivering it over several wireless networks, and its thumb-friendly keyboards made it popular with professionals. The name was coined by the marketing firm Lexicon Branding and chosen from about 40 options, because the keyboard buttons resembled the drupelets that make up the blackberry fruit. BlackBerry's dominance faded as touchscreen smartphones took over. In 2013, after weak sales of the Z10, the company cut around 4,500 jobs and announced it was exploring a sale.

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.