This theorem had it's origins in poetry.
On July 17, 1936 John Herbert de Paz Thorold Gosset first enunciated the generalisation of Descartes' Theorem in a private letter to Frederick Soddy and subsequently published in 1937. This added a fourth verse to Soddy's poem The Kiss Precise which was published in 1936.
F. Soddy, The Kiss Precise. Nature (June 20, 1936), p. 1021.
J. H. d. P. T. Gosset, The Kiss Precise, Nature 139, 62 (1937)
Here are all 4 verses put together (first 3 by Soddy and the last by Gosset):
The Kiss Precise
FOR pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.
Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the centre.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.
To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.
And let us not confine our cares
To simple circles, planes and spheres,
But rise to hyper flats and bends
Where kissing multiple appears.
In n-ic space the kissing pairs
Are hyperspheres, and Truth declares -
As n + 2 such osculate
Each with an n + 1 fold mate
The square of the sum of all the bends
Is n times the sum of their squares.