"For pity sake gentleman, be calm," 1881.

Here's a precursor to "talk to the hand," from aboriginal pottery of the Gulf Coast, featured in the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1903

"Here is that child, poring over her books again, wasting her precious time and eyesight."  From Winifred, or, An English Maiden in the Seventeenth Century by Lucy Ellen Guernsey, 1878.

Here's a Googlewhack variation on "The lights are on but nobody's home": "Lights on, not at the Waldorf."  From The Sketch, 1905.

Meeting a banshee, from Once a Week, 1859.

"The pumpkin light of Hallow-e'e[n] [i]s the only one by which elves are seen."  (From 1910.)  And once you see your elf, here's How to Believe in Your Elf.

Here's a prediction of downloading information in the year 2000.

From "I'd Be a Butterfly," The Illuminated Magazine, 1843.

This is the symbol left in the crib after the Lindbergh baby was famously taken away.  "There has been no genuinely convincing analytic work done on [this symbol] with respect to the Lindberg story" (Jerry Kroth, The Lindbergh Kidnapping, 2011).  [Note that the three black rectangles are actually holes that were punched in the paper and are not technically part of the design.]  The shaded object in the center is, of course, the "black egg" of alchemy, symbolizing the nigredo (a stage of putrefaction; the final step toward the "philosopher's stone" of enlightenment) and expressing "the precarious balance of the hermaphrodite, exalted by a [threatened] equilibrium" (Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art, 1994).

There was a time when ocean froth suggested purity and health.

"På vei til Trollslottet" by Theodor Kittelsen, 1904.

From Deirdre by Thomas William Hazen Rolleston, 1897.