The barcode began in 1948 when Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, overheard a grocery chain president asking for a way to read product information automatically at checkout. His friend Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which faded, then took the idea from Morse code, drawing dots and dashes as lines of varying width. The pair patented a circular 'bull's eye' design in 1949, and the patent was issued in 1952. Adoption was slow because grocers would not buy scanners until manufacturers printed codes, and manufacturers would not print codes until scanners were common. The breakthrough was IBM's linear Universal Product Code, chosen as the standard in 1973, since linear codes stayed readable even when printer ink smeared.

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.