The entire visible Internet unanimously declares that the checklists appeared after the crash of the “Model 299” military aircraft. This article shows that this is completely wrong, and the history of checklists is much more interesting.
(I would guess a lower bound might be whenever widespread availability of cheap paper occurred? parchment would've been way too expensive for checklists. with wax tablets, people would've made lists but just erased tasks when done)
When preparing the blog post, I also investigated the analogue term in Russian: контрольный список (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Контрольный_список). At first, I discovered the first mention in 1882, but then in 1823! So I can't say that it's the resolved question for me.
Google's german corpus turns up a few hits from 1850s and 1860s but without preview. Later hits are bibliographical entries for american naturalist books, such as Check List of the Ferns of North America North of Mexico (1875); I get the impression aficionados were supposed to "check off" each species until they'd "seen them all" but am not really sure.
NB. Google frequently mis-years books (easily double-checked against title page or anachronistic references); I should really check on Gallica or whatever the german equivalent may be...
Oh yes, I confirm Google's regular mis-yearing. When looking for the “checklist”, I started from service's lowest limit, year 1500, and moved to the more modern days. Usually, typography says for itself before you even discover the year on one of the first pages. When you see multiple columns grid layout in XVII century books, you already know that it is not from these times.:D
BTW, did you try looking in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/texts)? It was a place where I found the earliest 1841 evidence.
