Over at
Language Log, they've taken to calling the restrictive
that rule "
Fowler's Rule". And from what
I recall,
Merriam Webster's Usage also attributes this to Fowler (1926).
I was trolling Google books for
more on coordinating conjunctions, when I came across
Alexander Bain's
An English Grammar (published in 1863 by Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, one of the various incarnations of
Longman). A section in the introduction caught my attention (click for larger images):


This is followed up on p. 23 with the following:


Interestingly, in the examples that Bain supplies to show how
which can be ambiguous, he seems to completely overlook the comma, which--at least from this twenty-first-century viewpoint--removes any trace of doubt at all.
So, even if Fowler popularised the rule, Bain claims it as a novelty over 60 years earlier.
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