During the last year of World War II, surgeon Dwight Harken ran a field hospital in Gloucestershire, England, and removed bullets and shell fragments from 134 soldiers' chests. Fifty-six of them had metal lodged in their hearts, and every patient survived. Earlier heart surgery was rare and dangerous, with around half of patients dying, and many experts believed the heart could not be operated on safely. Harken showed that one surgeon could operate on more than 50 patients with no deaths, which made cardiac surgery look safe and routine. British surgeons travelled to watch him work. His success helped launch the speciality, which later expanded to repair congenital defects and treat disease.

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.