Nikola Tesla posed for a double-exposure photograph in his Colorado Springs laboratory around 1899, beneath a giant magnifying transmitter that threw arcs of electricity about twenty-two feet long. The images were made for The Century Magazine, and Tesla used them to promote his belief that electricity could be sent through the earth itself. He claimed to have picked up a signal from Mars, a claim that was never confirmed. The following year he began building the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, funded by J. P. Morgan, to test wireless power transmission. The project was abandoned, and wireless power on a grand scale never arrived in his form.

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.