Not really, these are just things that I came across now and again.

If you want to know more…

• We have evidence of train surfing, where you ride on the outside of trains, from the 1890s.
• Making up fake quotes from famous smart people goes back a long way. Somebody wrote a story that claimed that John Herschel, son of Uranus discoverer William Herschel, and a polymath in his own right, had discovered life on the moon. The first John Herschel heard of this was when he read the story in the newspaper.
• For a while, radium was seen as a kind of cure-all so you had things like radium toothpaste and radium water. How much actual radium was in the products depended greatly. So people slapping the next best thing on everything didn’t just start with AI.
• When homoeopathy was invented, it originally required you taking the homoeopathic thing you just made and slapping it against the Bible. Homeopaths don’t usually mention that.
• Manchester once had a chief of police that was a Christian zealot who spent massive amounts of police resources and time going after lewd magazines and gay bars. During this time crime exploded in the city.
• The US navy spent massive amounts of resources looking for a woman in the Chicago area called Dorothy that they believed knew all the gay men in the navy. They believe that because they heard the phrase “are you a friend of Dorothy”, which was a way gay people asked if someone was gay. The Dorothy in question was Dorothy Gayle from The Wizard of Oz. The US navy spent resources looking for Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
• People in pre-modern England believed that being touched by the king could cure illnesses.
• The reason why we believe that indigenous people thought that getting photographed would steal their soul wasn’t because they genuinely believed that, they understood the technology and the concept, with all of those native, people believe that those photos would be used against them, say, so the government could take their land. Manifest Destiny types just depicted them as believing the whole “soul” thing because they wanted to make them believe they were stupid and superstitious.