One of the areas that data science can have the greatest impact in terms of money connects to data science applied to hedge fund and other financial trading efforts.
Surely hedge funds and other financial trading efforts have been doing data science since long before it was called data science.
By at least a few centuries. I found this tidbit on candlestick charts in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homma_Munehisa It turns out that sort of chart was invented in the 18th century.
The term "data science" was coined fairly recently by Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera) and DJ Patil (White House) [1]