The earliest record of Manneken Pis is an administrative document from 1451 to 1452 about the water lines supplying Brussels' public fountains. The fountain was part of the city's drinking water system from the start, standing on a column and pouring water into a stone basin. A painting of a 1615 procession shows an earlier version of the statue, dressed as a shepherd. The city council commissioned the current bronze statue in 1619. It is only 55.5 centimetres tall and was made by the sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder, and was probably installed in 1620. Its column and basin were remodelled by a stone cutter at the same time.

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.