Most recently, a kooky Belfast fillmmaker got millions of people excited that there was a time traveler in the video extra of a Charlie Chaplin movie. 

Two professors at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne have been exploring this whole phenomenon, what they (half-ironically?) call The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. Lisa Gye and Darren Tofts have gone back through old magazines to find people making gestures like the ones that we make when we’re holding our phones.

from the atlantic.