Sneakers grew out of the plimsoll, a canvas shoe with a rubber sole that was first called a sand shoe in Britain until the 1870s. Vacationers and tennis and croquet players wore them for comfort, and the British Army ordered soles with engraved grip patterns in bulk. In 1895 the British firm J.W. Foster and Sons made the first shoes designed specifically for running, with spikes for traction, and its gear was worn by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell when they won Olympic sprint events in 1924. In America the same style became known as sneakers. Adolf Dassler started making sports shoes in his mother's wash kitchen in Herzogenaurach after World War I, and his company became Adidas.

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.