The QR code was developed in 1994 at Denso Wave, a Japanese automotive parts company, to replace the many barcode labels on boxes of car parts with a single square code. Its three corner markers were designed using a pattern the team found was rare in everyday printed material, so scanners could find it easily. The alternating black and white squares were influenced by Go stones. The code could hold kanji, kana and alphanumeric data at once, which made it far more capable than a standard barcode. It stayed a niche industrial tool until smartphones made it easy to scan.

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.