The word did not exist until 1834. And yes, the author mentions that in his article, then dismisses it. Before then, these types of people were called Natural Philosophers. I'm assuming that most of the nerds here will know this, but Philosophy translates in Latin to "love of wisdome." The reason we don't use the word "scientist" to describe people before the 1600's is because Francis Bacon first described what we now call the Scientific Method in the 1620's. Were people doing experiments and making discoveries before then? of course they were. With the exception of a few extremely gifted persons, however, the pursuit of knowledge did not have an agreed upon framework. It was once there was a way to quantify knowledge, explore the natural world, create a way of talking about experiments that human information began to grow exponentially. All of this is common knowledge to people who study science, philosophy and engineering. I'm not sure what the point of the author is. The author wrote a nice article on Galileo