Captain James Cook was a British Royal Navy officer and cartographer who led three voyages of exploration between 1768 and 1779. He made the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand's main islands and the first recorded European visit to Australia's east coast and to the Hawaiian Islands. Starting as a merchant navy sailor, he rose through the Royal Navy by surveying the St. Lawrence River and the coast of Newfoundland, which brought him to the attention of the Admiralty and the Royal Society. His voyages covered tens of thousands of miles of largely uncharted water, including Easter Island, Alaska and South Georgia. His work on preventing scurvy won him the Royal Society's Copley Medal. In 1779, during a second visit to Hawaii, a dispute with Native Hawaiians turned violent and Cook was killed. His charts and records shaped navigation well into the 20th century.

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.