The sandwich is named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century English aristocrat. A popular legend says he asked his valet for meat between two slices of bread so he could keep eating without greasing his cards during games, though his biographer argues he more likely ate at his desk during long work hours. Within a few decades people were ordering the same as Sandwich, and the name was in use by the diarist Edward Gibbon. The idea spread more slowly in America, where a recipe appeared in a cookbook only in 1815. By 1909 Eva Green Fuller's cookbook gave 400 different sandwiches, reflecting how cheap, portable food suited British industrial workers.

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.