I have always at least thought of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, as scientists. Hey, they were the backbone of the scientific revolution! But that word never touched their lips. Nope. The word did not reach the English language until the nineteenth century. Read on:
“In the early nineteenth century writers were still using ‘science’ for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric…
The word ‘scientist’ was invented in 1833 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science was holding its third annual meeting. The word was suggested by William Whewell, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer…
The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as ‘man of science’, or ’naturalist’, or ‘experimental philosopher’. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century’s most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused ‘scientist’ of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die ’than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms’. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that ‘scientist’ was fully accepted.”
Source:
• Science: a four thousand year history, by Patricia Fara