Porting and muzzle breaks go WAY back.
In fact I have seen rifles that go back before WW1 with ported barrels and breaks.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say it probably started with various forms of artillery and was scaled down to small arms.
It didn't catch on with sporting arms until the late 60s with Larry Kelly's Mag-Na_Port company.
Or course the old Cutts Compensator was around in the 20s on some guns, shotguns mostly, but they were made for others too, including the 1921, and 1928 models of the Thompson sub-machine guns.

As a rile, ports are effect, but not as effective as compensators. The rule is that the more "walls" you have for the gas to strike in an upward or forward direction, the better they work, the worse they look, and the louder they get.

There is no "free lunch" in physics. The energy being re-directed to reduce recoil has to go somewhere. Some is turned into noise.