In 2013 the Oxford Dictionaries named selfie its word of the year, but the practice is much older than smartphones. In 1839 Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast in Philadelphia, set up his camera at the back of his family's store. He removed the lens cap, ran into the frame, sat still for about a minute and then covered the lens again. On the back of the resulting image he wrote The first light Picture ever taken. 1839. It is considered by many to be the first photographic portrait. Early photographers often photographed themselves because it was simpler than finding a model who could sit still. The picture shows how early experiments in the new medium were shaped by practical limits.

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.