The Paralympic movement grew out of a rehabilitation programme at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England, where neurosurgeon Ludwig Guttmann set up the National Spinal Injuries Centre. Guttmann had fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and he used sport as part of rehabilitation, introducing archery, darts, table tennis and wheelchair basketball. On 29 July 1948, the same day the London Olympics opened, a small group of patients competed in an archery contest. These 'paraplegic games' became an annual event, and the first international edition took place in 1952 with a team from the Netherlands. In 1960 the games were held in Rome after the Olympics and are considered by most to be the first Paralympics. The name 'Paralympics' was first used at Tokyo in 1964.

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.