In Herman Lukoff's autobiography "From Dits to Bits", he describes building a radio where he surface mounted the components to the glass envelope of the vacuum tube. I believe that he constructed it before World War II. Traditional vacuum tube chassis were usually heavy metal assemblies so this was pretty radical.

Unfortunately, once the tube reached operating temperature, his painstakingly hand drawn traces and glued down components delaminated. However, it shows that people were thinking about that sort of thing.