Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, published in the 1860s and 70s, showed vertebrate embryos such as fish, chick, turtle and human looking strikingly alike early in development. He argued this similarity reflected common descent, and the grids became one of the most widely seen images in biology textbooks. Critics accused him of drawing the embryos too similar, and he admitted that some woodblocks were reused for different species. Modern biologists reject the drawings as inaccurate, though the broader evidence for evolution from molecular homologies is strong.

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.