As the others point out, there is no knowing about the earliest this was written down. For example, the notion of regularity of a ternary form is due to Dickson, but universality is an easier concept and could have gone without any name for quite some time.
Worth pointing out that all universal ternaries can be described. Three out of four types are in Dickson's 1939 book; the one type with odd "mixed" coefficients was proved by A. Oppenheim in 1930.
The following are representative forms under the action of $SL_3 \mathbb Z$ as follows: given the Hessian matrix $H$ of a quadratic form, a new representative is $P^T H P.$
Taking $N$ odd, while $M$ is any integer, we have universal $$ xy-Mz^2 $$ $$ 2xy - N z^2 $$ $$ 2xy + y^2 - N z^2 $$ $$ 2xy + y^2 - 2N z^2 $$