 When did the term ‘revolution’ become a descriptor of specifically scientific developments? In the most thorough treatment of the history of the concept of scientific revolution, I. B. Cohen (1985) notes that the French word revolution was being used in early eighteenth-century France to mark significant developments. By mid-century it was pretty clear that Clairaut, D’Alembert, Diderot and others sometimes applied the term to scientific developments, including Newton’s achievement but also to Descartes’ rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. Cohen fails to note that Émilie Du Châtelet preceded them, in her Institutions de Physique of 1740, where she distinguished scientific from political revolutions (Châtelet and Zinnser 2009, p. 118). However, the definition of revolution in the Encyclopédie of the French philosophes was still political. Toward the end of the century, Condorcet could speak of Lavoisier as having brought about a revolution in chemistry; and, indeed, Lavoisier and his associates also applied the term to their work, as did Cuvier to his. Meanwhile, of course, Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781), spoke of his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy. In fact, Cohen (1985) and Ian Hacking (2012) credit Kant with originating the idea of a scientific revolution, although Kant had read Du Châtelet. Interestingly, for Kant (1798) political revolutions are, by nature, unlawful, whereas Locke, in his social contract theory, had permitted them under special circumstances.