The early eighteenth century witnessed a vogue for science lecturing in the wake of the pioneering endeavours of scientists such as Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley and Robert Hooke and the founding of the Royal Society in 1662.

Bath had long attracted students of chemistry and medicine keen to legitimise claims for the curative properties of its hot spring waters, and soon the patronage of the aristocracy heralded the first wave of the city's Georgian popularity.

The first commercial public science (or natural philosophy) lecture was presented by John Theophilus Desaguliers in 1724, explaining the phenomenon of a total eclipse of the sun, which had occurred in May of that year.

Its first home was a grand new building designed by George Allen Underwood on the site of Harrison's Assembly Rooms in Terrace Walk (which had been destroyed by fire in 1820).

Its archives contain bound volumes of letters from eminent scientists and naturalists such as Charles Darwin, Professor John Stevens Henslow and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker.