How long is the wire wrapped around a modern resistor?
Typically wire-wound resistors use an alloy such Manganin. It has a volume resistivity about 13 times higher than copper. There are other resistance wire alloys. Equally important, it has a low temperature coefficient and a reasonably low thermal EMF relative to copper. 100K is also a rather high value for a wirewound resistor- it would tend to be rather large, maybe 10-15mm long at a minimum, and close to the highest value for a standard part. They use a thin wire for high resistance, and much larger diameters for low resistances. 

As an example, a proprietary NiCrAl resistance wire similar to Manganin is available in 0.015mm diameter, and has a resistance of about 7500\$\Omega\$/m so you'd need about 13m of it for a 100K resistor. 



Chip resistors, of course, don't use wire, they have a very thin pattern of a material such as ruthenium oxide on a ceramic base, passivated with a layer of glass and trimmed by abrasive or laser. There are SMT metal foil resistors, some of which use clever tricks to achieve extreme accuracy and stability with temperature and time. 

There are other materials such as carbon film (which is deposited onto a ceramic rod in an appropriate thickness for a given value, and then spiral cut to achieve a specific value, before being coated with lacquer and color bands). 

Even a graphite pencil marking on a piece of ceramic can be used as a resistor. Generally resistors that are high value are typically film types. Up to 1T\$\Omega\$ resistors are not that difficult to make (way beyond what is typically useful). Here are some Ruthenium oxide resistors up to 1T "on request". 



With regard to your edit, there was little need for precise stable resistor values in the 1800s. You could make a coarse resistor by mixing graphite with some kind of non-conductive binder. Early ones were made as a bare rod with wires wrapped around the ends, in fact it was possible to buy thermistors made that way as recently as 1985. When vacuum tubes became available, one application of high value resistors was the "grid leak resistor". Below is a photo of one from 1926 (from the Wiki article)



According to one source: 


  All the old grid leaks were primitive and none of them were really reliable at their very best. The majority of the ones in a glass tube were made from a thin strip of cardboard soaked in India ink, and the resistance changed with the humidity. 
  
  Some of the very early leaks used by experimenters were no more than a soft lead pencil mark that could be added to or erased for changing the resistance. I suppose you could call these the first variable grid leaks, and a few manufactured sets had this type under a small removable cap on the front panel.