The Forth Bridge, opened on 4 March 1890, was Britain's first major steel structure and is built as a cantilever: two giant towers hold up arms that reach out and meet in the middle. Its first design, by Thomas Bouch, was abandoned after his Tay Bridge collapsed in a storm in December 1879, with an estimated 75 deaths. The replacement by Benjamin Baker and John Fowler used cantilevers because no scaffolding could be erected over the water, so the structure supported itself as it grew. Foundations were built with compressed-air caissons, where men worked in chambers under the riverbed, and two men drowned when one flooded. To explain how cantilevers balance loads, Baker used a human model at an 1887 lecture, with a seated man at the centre whose arms and ropes carried tension.

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.