"I would that this dear path might type my way" (1870): a precursor to Charles Dizenzo:

"Imagine if I had an electric at my command: I could type my way around the world at jet speed!" (A Great Career: A One-Act Play, 1966).

A friend made a graph comparing how much folks talk nonstop about bacon to the number of damns the rest of us give about how much any of them like bacon.  He noted, "What really makes the bacon thing (and other such things) annoying to me is that by the time they attain 'thing' status, they no longer seem to be about loving whatever it is—it seems to be more of a fetishization and status marker (i.e., the status of someone duly participating in whatever the zeitgeist has determined his/her demographic should participate in). You and I love cheese because, well, we really love cheese—not because the concept of 'cheese' has become a totem or a meme!"

Flirting with bacon as a status marker goes back at least to the mid-1800s, as we see in this illustration from The Oxford Thackeray.

Here's a precursor to The Village People, from (what else?) Bachelor Ballads by Harry A. Spurr, 1899.

Here's a precursor to the quotation craze — an author of "bits of books" from The Man in the Moon, 1847.

Here's a precursor to Prof. Henry Higgins and flower girl Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion (1912), from an advertisement in A Lawful Crime by Edward Kent, 1899.  The illustration is by Phil May.

A precursor to 1958's hula hoop, from a 1900 issue of The Lady's Realm.

Here's what we might call a precursoral opposite.  In The Shining (1980), countless variations of the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" cover hundreds of typewritten pages, revealing that Jack Torrance is disturbed.  In a 1908 issue of The Windsor Magazine, the blankness of a page reveals that someone is disturbed.

The caption reads, "'You have been disturbed!' she cried sorrowfully, as she took in the blankness of the page."

Hundreds of years before the phenomenon of walking while texting, folks were glued to windows, insensible to the wonders around them.  We find proof in Arthur's Home Magazine, 1876.  The caption reads: "She stood leaning against a window, but not seeing the beauty that lay stretched before her."

Here's a precursor to comedian Steve Martin's arrow-through-the-head gag, from Bachelor Ballads and Other Lazy Lyrics by Harry A. Spurr and illustrated by J. Hassall (1899).  However, we understand that the gag technically traces back to the play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), with this stage direction: "Enter Rafe, with a forked arrow through his head."

The phenomenon of sunlight shining haloes through clouds of ice crystals helped to inspire John Dee's famous hieroglyphic monad.

Here's a precursor to the Teletubbies sun, from Lilliput Lyrics by William Brighty Rands, 1899.

Here's a precursor to the "unfollow" and "unfriend" phenomenon of social media, from Springhaven: A Tale of the Great War by Rochard Doddridge Blackmore, 1888.  The caption reads, "I am not at all happy at losing dear friends."

A decade before Stanislavski's "system" and three decades before Strasberg's "method," we find "a modern method" for acting in The Lady's Realm (1901) by the mysterious M. M. M.  But mostly we just like the wonky font.

Here's a precursor to the animal print craze of the 1960s Bohemian movement, from Punch, 1867.

"The world in which we live[:] the abominable, sentimental, mob-ruled world of cheap newspapers and cheaper minds, where every imbecile is articulate and every folly tolerated, where the arts are dying out and the intellect is scorned, where every little cheap-jack knows what he likes and what he thinks.  Our moralities, our democracy, have taught us to suffer fools gladly, and now we suffer from an overplus of fools." —The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944)

"What odd, misshapen, ugly things I made."  If only Etsy had existed back in 1719.  From Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

This "Black Death Record" is a precursor to the music label Black Death Records, from The Grange of St. Giles, the Bass by Jane Stewart Smith, 1898.

Here's a precursor to the modern computer from The Chase of the Golden Plate by Jacques Futrelle (1906).  The caption reads: "Suddenly he stopped and turned upon The Thinking Machine."