The Olympic flame first appeared at the 1928 Amsterdam Summer Olympics. A large fire burned in a bowl on top of a tall tower beside the stadium, so people for miles around could see where the Games were. The idea came from ancient Greece, where sacred fires burned at sanctuaries such as Olympia and were said to descend from fire that Prometheus stole from the gods. The torch relay that carries the flame to the host city came later, debuting at the 1936 Berlin Games.

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.