1828 15 Science 77 Plane curves having a given caustic; focal curves.
1929 (Royal Soc.) A. 228 338 The locus of the foci we call the ‘focal curve’.
2002 N. M. Patrikalakis & T. Maekawa viii. 203 For a parametric space curve r ( t ), a focal curve or an evolute..is defined as f ( t ) = r( t ) + n( t )/κ.