At a crucial moment in his career in 1889, Liverpool's first Professor of Physics, Oliver Lodge, was invited to form a Society for the cultivation of physics in the city. Alongside other locally-based organizations, such as the Literary and Philosophical Society, the Engineering Society and the Society for Chemical Industry, the Physical Society formed part of an intellectual network in the city, frequently involving the same people; Lodge remained a key figure within this network long after he had left Liverpool to become Principal of the new University of Birmingham.

The Physical Society was at first very successful, gaining early audiences of over 100, but support gradually dwindled as the lack of a real nucleus of physicists in the city began to tell, until it was maintained in effect, only by the efforts of the members of Lodge's department at University College. However, during the same period, and partly as a result of the Society, Lodge was able to create a new role for himself as a large-scale public educator, explaining those scientific discoveries which had been sensationalised by the local press, in spectacular lectures to massive audiences. From then on, his career as a public communicator took off, and, overall, he delivered well over a hundred public lectures to about seventy different organizations, ten of which asked him to be President.

The original Society was eventually saved from extinction by amalgamation with a new student body, whose existence had been made possible by Lodge's very successful development and expansion of the Physics Department at University College.