Pinball descends from outdoor ball games, which moved onto tabletops as billiards and bagatelle. In Louis XIV's France, billiard tables were narrowed with pins at one end, and the pins were later fixed in place, with holes in the table becoming the targets. Between the 1750s and 1770s a game called Billard japonais added a spring plunger to launch the ball up an inclined playfield. In 1871 Montague Redgrave patented a spring launcher in the United States, and his innovations are often seen as the birth of modern pinball. From the 1930s coin-operated machines followed, and in 1947 Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty added player-controlled flippers, turning the game into one of skill.

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.