Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez, an Austrian naturalist, built a small sheet-iron diving bell with thick glass windows while working in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Weighted down with cannonballs and supplied with air, it let him sit about five metres under the sea for sessions of up to three hours. He drew with soft pencil on varnished paper and sent his finished sketches up to the surface in a tin box. He later painted over them in oils, producing what are considered the first depictions of the seascape made by an artist underwater. Four were reproduced as lithographs in his 1867 book.

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.