Also:

  human dissection (grave robbing)
  translating the Bible into English
  silk production outside of China (death penalty for exporting worm eggs)
  rubber production in Asia (seeds smuggled out of Brazil)
  the Underground Railroad
  heliocentrism
  AIDS treatment (see Dallas Buyers Club)
  Needle exchange programs for IV drug users
  Ridesharing/airbnb/napster (obvious ones)
  SF gay marriage licenses (in defiance of CA law)

Translating the Bible into English was not illegal. I very much doubt Bede or the monks of Lindisfarne were breaking the law!

The same for heliocentrism. No one took Copernicus to court.

With silk and rubber the smuggling was illegal, the actual cultivation was not

Grave robbing was illegal (and still is) but dissection was not.

Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries.

Reference to support the claim that translating the bible into English was banned (William Tyndale was executed for doing it): https://nobimu.no/en/subject-articles/banned-translations-of...

You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.

Unauthorized Bible translations were prohibited in England at the time, but Tyndale was executed in the Netherlands, where there was no such ban: https://books.google.de/books?id=mfZlsUVYClwC&pg=P315&source...

The context of this is the list of examples was of things done illegally for the first time - it lists these things as "also" in response to a claim that water was *first* chlorinated illegally.

While there were bans or a requirement for authorisation of translations of the Bible in certain times and places (mostly the 1300s to 1500s) the first translations of (parts of the) Bible into English had been done centuries before this, some as early at the 7th century. This makes them some of the oldest written works we know of in English at all. They were also done by the church.

> You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.

When did this happen? Tyndale was tried and executed by the secular authorities in a place where there were no laws against translating the Bible.

The earliest translations into English were done by the Church.

Galileo. You are right about Copernicus.

>Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries

I'm not sure what your point is here

> The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.

I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?

>Jersey City v. Jersey Water Supply Company

Thank you for replying, I appreciate it. I enjoyed learning more about this history. Making a citation invites the risk of being contradicted, and I respect that.

I do still disagree for the following reasons:

- Jersey City started chlorinating in 1908; Maidstone, England started chlorinating in 1897 and Lincoln, England started chlorinating in 1905. So Jersey City wasn't the first to chlorinate their water.

However, Jersey City seems to be the first deployment in the United States, so perhaps that is what you meant. If this were the only issue I would concede the point.

- This was a civil matter and not a criminal matter.

- The dispute wasn't whether chlorination was legal or acceptable but whether it was sufficient to deliver "pure and wholesome" water. The city wanted them to build a sewer. The utility didn't really dispute that there was a water quality issue but they built a chlorination plant instead of building a sewer (while the lawsuit was still ongoing).

- The water utility won. They demonstrated that chlorination was sufficient.

That's the impression I took from Wikipedia and this writeup: https://www.dolmetsch.com/chlorination_history.pdf (Starting on page 4)