Here's a precursor to Escheresque architecture, from Geschichte Oesterreichs by Alexander Patuzzi, 1862 (thirty-six years before Escher was born).

Here's a precursor to TED Talks.  The caption reads, "The living hand on the screen, shown during the course of a lecture delivered by Henry Morton at the Academy of Music, New York, February 3, 1871."  From Morton Memorial by Franklin De Ronde Furman, 1905.

Here's a precursor to the "great dorg" of a film Mannequin (1987), from The Tinted Venus by J. Bernard Partridge, 1898.  The caption reads, "'It is a miserable thing,' he was thinking, 'for a man to have a female statue trotting after him like a great dorg.'"

Fifty years before Phil Spector invented the "Wall of Sound," there was the sphere of sound, as we see in this illustration from the magazine Crisis, 1910.

♪ ♫  Tale as old as time

Here's a precursor to the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, from an ad in the back of the novel A Woman with a History by Weedon Grossmith (1896).

This precursor to Mary Poppins appears in Fra Det Moderne Frankrig by Richard Kaufmann, 1882.

"Keep on keeping on": We can do a bit better than Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, which traces that phrase back to the 1910s.  Consider Charles Haddon Spurgeon back in 1888: "I spoke about the difficulty of keeping on.  'Yes,' answered my friend, 'and it is harder still to keep on keeping on'" (Spurgeon's Gold: New Selections from the Works of C. H. Spurgeon, p. 30).

Here's a precursor to James and the Giant Peach, from The Child World by Gabriel Setoun, 1896.

Here's a precursor to a Peter Lorre caricature, from The Farm Poultry, 1907.  (Peter would have been just three years old at the time.)

Here's a precursor to 'We are all Santa' and 'Your face here,' from Some Account of Colton and of the De Wasteney's Family by Frederick Perrot Parker (1897).  The caption reads: "St. Nicholas."

Here's a precursor to the space-folding "Holtzman Effect" from Frank Herbert's Dune universe (1965), as seen in Jeanne d'Arc et la Normandie au XVme Siècle by Albert Sarrazin, 1896.

Here's a precursor to the tacky tourist postcard culture of Florida, from Camping and Cruising in Florida by James Alexander Henshall, 1884.

Here's a precursor to the film Carry On Camping (1969), from All about Ramsgate and Broadstairs (1870).  The caption reads, "The gentleman who spends the morning near the ladies' bathing machines."

Here's a precursor to the Major Domo character from the film Captain Eo (1986), from Monographien Zur Deutschen Kulturgeschichte by Georg Steinhausen, 1899.  (Major Domo photo via Prop Store.)