Soap-like mixtures of fat and alkali were used in Mesopotamia by about 2800 BC, with a clay tablet from around 2500 BC describing oil heated with wood ash, probably the earliest recorded chemical reaction. True soap, which foams and can be made hard or soft, emerged later once makers understood alkali sources. Romans rarely washed with soap before the first century AD, preferring to scrape off oil with a metal strigil, and Pliny the Elder called soap an invention of the Gauls. Soap-making spread through the Islamic world, where Syrian olive-oil soap became a major trade good, and then into Europe. By the 1600s soap production was large-scale in several European cities.

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.