Here is a precursor to the contemporary legend about how police trick a criminal into confessing by convincing him a photocopier is a lie detector. In “The Man and the Machine,” Crime Exposed, vol. 1, no. 8, January 1952, the “lie detector” is a slot machine. (Alas, no colander is involved.)
The memoir of British musician and songwriter Richard Thompson relates a rumor from 1968 that a child was going to be burned at the stake at a London music club, leading to an attack on the club by outraged workers.
Here’s the only other reference to the rumor I could find, in a review of ElectrickNick: No Direction Home (2013), which quotes the independently published memoir by Nick Butt and Richard Harris.
“One Sunday afternoon a few months later we were putting on a benefit for a group called The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom when we were raided aggressively by the Bow Street constabulary. As they left they told the market traders that we were burning a child at the stake, which goaded them into smashing up the whole club with axes and grappling hooks.”
http://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2018/08/electricnick-no-direction-home-by-nick.html
“Sign in an optometrist’s window: Eyes examined while you wait.” A once-common newspaper filler, and also the subject of many cartoons and comic strips, the funny optometrist’s sign may be based on ads (and window signs?) for jewelry stores, which in the early twentieth century often had optical departments. I suppose while customers waited for their watch or ring (say) to be examined or retrieved, they could have their eyes looked at, too. I supply three examples of jewelry store ads; also one from an eye doctor that states: “Cross Eyes Examined While You Wait.”
TV Girls and Gags, vol. 6, no. 3, May 1959, pp. 68-9.
The Evening Times (Cumberland, MD), 12 September 1903, p. 5.
Excerpt from “Watch Your Watch,” a 7-paragraph ad in the Catskill Mountain News (Margaretville NY), 20 Nov. 1903, p. 10. Herbert Vermilyea was a jeweler and watchmaker.
The Syracuse (NY) Herald, 5 Feb. 1904, p. 16.
Boston Post, 23 January 1906, p. 2.
