Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution

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. The lecture may…

In 1777 Edmund Rack, the son of a Norfolk labouring weaver, founded the first of Bath's scientific and literary societies. Although partly modelled on the Royal Society of London and other such institutions, Rack was particularly concerned with agricultural and planting improvements in the West Country and so the society would be known as the Bath and West of England Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later to become the Royal Bath and West of England Society, its home moving from Bath to Shepton Mallet in 1974 after 196 years with its headquarters in the city). The Bath society published Aims, Rules and Orders and, like its London progenitor,…