As the title says, this is a history of the term and concept of qualia (pl) or quale (sing) up until the work of philosopher C.I. Lewis in the late 1920s. I contend that it was the work of Lewis that cemented our contemporary sense of the term, but that earlier it got deployed in interestingly different ways, particularly as it relates to the senses. Certainly, what we now take to be paradigmatic examples of “qualia” are importantly different now than then.