In 1664 the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a two-volume atlas-sized book describing the hidden interior of the Earth. He argued that the planet was hollow and riddled with passages, with great underground fires feeding volcanoes and great seas linked to them by channels. Kircher believed tides pushed water deep into the Earth to stoke these fires, and he compared the movement of water to the circulation of blood described by William Harvey. The book also covered fossils, spontaneous generation, and the location of Atlantis, alongside illustrations of giants and dragons. Some of his ideas were wrong but others, such as his explanation of how igneous rock forms, were among the earliest printed. His theory grew out of a dangerous trip in 1638 when he witnessed an earthquake in the Straits of Messina.

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.