NGC 3430 is a spiral galaxy about 100 million light-years away in Leo Minor, with three prominent arms and plenty of gas and dust between them. In 1926 Edwin Hubble classified some four hundred galaxies by appearance into spiral, barred spiral, lenticular, elliptical or irregular types. Before that, astronomers debated whether these nebulae lay inside the Milky Way, and Henrietta Leavitt's work on Cepheid stars helped Hubble show they were distant, independent galaxies. His typology was so influential that the more detailed schemes used today are still built on it. NGC 3430 is an SAc galaxy, a spiral without a central bar, with open and well-defined arms.

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.