In the late 1680s the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, ill and isolated in The Hague after losing his post in Paris, began writing Cosmotheoros, a book speculating about life on other planets. Unlike earlier work based on philosophy or religion, it drew on recent scientific knowledge. He asked his brother to publish it only after his death, which came in 1698. Huygens had discovered Saturn's moon Titan in 1655 and had worked out that Saturn was surrounded by a ring, so he had good grounds to picture what the sky looked like from another world. He wondered about the effects that Saturn's ring would have on those who lived beneath it. The book was quickly translated into Dutch and English, where it appeared as The Celestial Worlds Discover'd.

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.