When did wormholes first appear in the scripts?

I think the first mention of a wormhole in Star Trek was actually in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which appeared in 1979. The Enterprise had been refitted and it had a new warp core and so forth and it wasn�t really ready to be launched. There is a desperate need for it to be launched for an important mission so they took off anyway. The engines created an artificial wormhole because they misfired in some interesting fashion.

The wormhole was a really interesting, fascinating moment in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and so we knew that that would be a fun idea to revisit it in later series. It became the benchmark of Deep Space Nine and it is a really intriguing idea that the fans have very much responded to. With our warp drive we can travel from here to the next nearest star in a couple of days. But the wormhole gave us the opportunity to travel 50,000 light years, half the breadth of the galaxy, in a matter of seconds. That was an astonishing thing, even for our 24th Century characters.