(I hope there will be a factual answer to this)
The phrase “All swans are white” is often used as a demonstration of the limitations of inductive logic. How did it come to be so?
In particular, did the example exist as an instance of induction before it was known to be false (ie. before we discovered antipodean black swans)?
I think you’ll have to go fairly far back. From Wikipedia: “The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote in 82 AD of rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno (‘a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan’). He meant something whose rarity would compare with that of a black swan, or in other words, as a black swan did not exist, neither did the supposed characteristics of the ‘rare bird’ with which it was being compared.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_emblems_and_popular_culture)
I don’t know that we can say for certain that Juvenal meant that black swans did not exist. I suspect it’s much more likely that he meant what he said: black swans did exist, but (from a Roman perspective) were vanishingly rare. We know other birds are occasionally disoriented and fly quite a long distance from their habitual range. How can we say that no black swan has ever reached South Asia, where knowledge of it could have spread to Juvenal?
At any rate, it seems that people suspected they existed by 82 A.D., and Juvenal was widely read. I’d be surprised if the logical phrase you quote antedated that.
Aritstotle makes frequent use of white swans in the examples in his Prior Analytics but I don’t know that he ever actually said that “All swans are white.”
This link may help.
Cicero, sitting near lake Monger, home of the black swan.
From Cicero’s link:
Wikipedia confirms the myth without evidence. I’d love to find an ante-australia cite for the use of the phrase.
That article mentions John Stuart Mill as the first to use Black Swans as an example of falsification. My hypothesis is that Mill’s usage is part of a modern day conspiracy to slander non-existent believers that all swans were white.
Dr Drake’s Juvenal cite fits into my conspiracy theory 
that, while the occasional philosopher may have mentioned the whiteness of swans - or the absence of blackness - the phrase did not become the canonical example of induction until after it was falsified.
My search continues!
edit: Never mind, I did not realize what exactly was being asked.
Like most Wikipedia articles, we have to treat this one with a huge amount of skepticism. It begins by claiming that black swans were discovered in Western Australia, when in fact the first specimens were collected in South Eastern Australia..
The Wikipedia article then “supports” this erroneous claim with a reference to article allegeldly titled “Black Swan Unique to Western Australia”, but which hyperlinks to a grade school article on state flags prepared by the australian parliament, titled “Western Australia At a Glance”.
IOW like so many Wikipedia articles it is highly factually erroneus and the supposed refernces do not, in fact, suport the assertions made, and in this case do not, in fact, exist.
So until some better evidence comes to light it’s best to assume the whole Wikipedia article is equally poorly researched and equally erroneous.
Thanks Blake. I didn’t read the article in depth.