Sutherland Macdonald opened a public tattoo studio called The Hammam on Jermyn Street in London, and by the late 1800s he was tattooing members of the aristocracy and society. He worked in a white coat, borrowing the look of a medical professional, and used an electromagnetic machine with interchangeable needles. The studio sat beside a Turkish bath and was decorated with cushions in a fashionable oriental style. Macdonald deliberately called himself a tattooist rather than a tattooer, to set his trade apart from manual labour. By 1900 the French magazine L'Illustration had called him the Michelangelo of tattooing.

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.