It's much older than 1963. Erasmus was researching this in the 15th/16th century, but John Wilkins' 1668 book is probably the most well known of the early works[1].
Wilkins was trying to derive a language in which each word functioned as an index into a universal ontology of concepts, so that the concept represented by a word could be deduced by breaking apart the structure of the word itself. This is an interesting (if quixotic) experiment, but it's really concerned with building an a priori language.
The study of linguistic universals is the study of properties of natural languages: for example, all languages have pronouns is a linguistic universal, because it is a property that is true of all natural human languages. This is clearly not something that Wilkins was working towards: he was building a new language for the purpose of perfecting and clarifying communication. His Real Character had little—if anything—to do with analysis of the properties of natural language, and therefore also has little to do with the study of linguistic universals.