Learn English – What was the idiom for multitasking before chewing gum was invented

From Wikipedia:

Cock and Bull

A pair of coaching inns alongside the former A5 road or the old Roman road Watling Street in Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire, England), named respectively 'The Cock' and 'The Bull', are said to have given rise to the term "cock and bull stories." Coaches or the Mail coach would stop in the town on their way from London to the North and many a traveller's tall tale would be further embellished as it passed between the two hostelries, fuelled by ale and an interested audience. Hence any suspiciously elaborate tale would become a cock and bull story. This is a cock-and bull story in itself, however; as there is no evidence to suggest that this is where the phrase originated. The phrase, first recorded in 1621, may instead be an allusion to Aesop's fables, with their incredible talking animals. As this slightly predates coaching inns, the names of the two inns could have been a reference to "Cock and Bull stories" as to encourage the passing of such anecdotes within their doors.

Edit:

Having investigated further, I think Wikipedia is being a bit harsh. Saying that there is no evidence suggests that there is no Cock or Bull coaching inns in Stony Stratford. In fact there are, and have been for donkey's years. Indeed, every year Stony Stratford hosts a story telling event to celebrate this fact. Not only that, but Watling Street is a very famous road, though if you were stand on the London end of it, in Cheapside, you could be forgiven for not realising this, as it is little more than an alley there.

So what would count as further evidence? If there was a competing origin to the Stony Stratford version, I could understand, but to call the Stony Stratford Cock and Bull story a cock and bull story on the basis that there is no blue plaque commemorating the coining of the phrase, seems a bit harsh.

Lover's String (also found as Lovers' String or Lover's Telegraph) was the name used in the late 19th Century in documents relating to the development and patenting of the electric telephone.

In documents relating to Mr Bell's 2nd patent (#186,787 of Jan 30, 1877), there is discussion of the origin of the telephone in which we find this text:

He shows and describes it as a "stretched" diaphragm, with a piece of soft iron attached to it, showing that it is to be an elastic membrane, and not of iron. He got his idea from the lover's string telephone, which is ordinarily made with a diaphragm of parchment or bladder.

Conklin's Handy Manual of Useful Information and World's Atlas of 1891 (as well as several other publications) mentions this:

In 1831, Wheatstone showed that when the sounding boards of two musical instruments were connected together by a rod of pine wood, a tune played on one will be faithfully reproduced by the other. Somewhat later a toy, called the Lovers' String, was made, and is the simplest form of a mechanical telephone. The toy consisted of two tin cups, the bottoms made of parchment or cat gut tightly stretched like a drum head, and connected, one with the other, by a string or cord. When the string was drawn taut, sounds such as those of ordinary speech produced in front of one of the cups were transmitted along the string to the other cup and reproduced there. This was the first telephone.

There is an image of the text in a different publication, here.