Thomas Wright Hill is generally credited with inventing STV in the early 19th century. A statement of his voting rule appears in the Laws of the Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement; established in Birmingham, October the 19th, 1819.

Brian Wichmann has kindly provided a scan of this document, downloadable as a 5MB PDF. The original is available for inspection in the Birmingham Central Library (reference 62702).

The rule itself appears in section X of the bylaws:

There are three papers in Voting matters Issue 27, now available at the Voting matters web site:

• The paper by Joseph Durham and Peter Lindener, Moderated Differential Pairwise Tallying, considers a method of electing candidates using a preferential ballot which is quite unlike STV. The paper details the rationale behind the method, using Borda scores and Condorcet as starting points.

  As with all such methods, it is difficult to convince people to use a new system, even given a detailed analysis of its effects. How do voters react to knowing that later preferences can affect the earlier ones?

That's actually the title of a paper that Douglas Woodall published in Voting matters back in 2003. Woodall's introduction says, in part:

There are three papers in Issue 26, now available at the Voting matters web site:

• A Buhagiar and J Lauri: STV in Malta: A crisis?
  Anton Buhagiar and Josef Lauri consider a critical problem in the use of STV in Malta. Although STV is well established in Malta, the two-party system has the effect of expecting a higher degree of proportionality than STV can actually deliver. The authors propose a very interesting solution to this problem.
• Brian Wichmann: Review — Mathematics and Democracy.
  

Voting matters Issue 24 is now online (note the new domain name).

In conjunction with my paper (with David Hill) on some technical details of the Droop quota, Henry Droop's seminal paper on his eponymous quota has been published as part of this issue. Droop's paper has not been widely available in the public domain, as far as I know. Now it is, thanks in large part to the yeoman efforts of Vm editor Brian Wichmann.

It's worth a read.