Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 06.djvu/178

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Bradley
166
Bradley

the Rev. C. Bradley of Southgate, well known in educational circles. The 4th, George Granville, was dean of Westminster 1881 to 1902, having been previously master of University College, Oxford, and head-master of Marlborough College. By his second marriage in 1840 with Emma, daughter of Mr. John Linton, he also left a large family, one of whom, Herbert Bradley, fellow of Merton College, Oxford, wrote on ethics and logic; another, Andrew Cecil, was fellow of Balliol, and professor of English literature at Liverpool.

Bradley spent the last period of his life at Cheltenham, where he died in August 1871.

[Personal knowledge.]

G. G. B.


BRADLEY, GEORGE (1816–1863), journalist, was born at Whitby in Yorkshire in 1816, and apprenticed to a firm of printers in his native town. After being for several years a reporter on the 'York Herald' he was appointed editor of the 'Sunderland and Durham County Herald,' and about 1848 he became editor and one of the proprietors of the 'Newcastle Guardian.' He resided at Newcastle until his death on 14 Oct. 1863, being greatly respected, and for a considerable period an influential member of the town council. Bradley published 'A Concise and Practical System of Short-hand Writing, with a brief History of the Progress of the Art. Illustrated by sixteen engraved lessons and exercises,' London, 1843, 12mo. The system is a variation of Dr. Mavor's.

[Whitby Times, 23 Oct. 1863; Rockwell's Teaching, Practice, and Literature of Shorthand, 70.]

T. C.


BRADLEY, JAMES (1693–1762), astronomer-royal, was the third son of William Bradley, a descendant of a family seated at Bradley Castle, county Durham, from the fourteenth century, by his marriage, in 1678, with Jane Pound of Bishop's Canning in Wiltshire. He was born at Sherbourn in Gloucestershire, probably in the end of March 1693, but the date is not precisely ascertainable. He was educated at the Northleach grammar school, and was admitted as a commoner to Balliol College, Oxford, 15 March 1711, when in his eighteenth year, proceeding B.A. 15 Oct. 1714, and M.A. 21 June 1717. His university career had little share in moulding his genius. His uncle, the Rev. James Pound, rector of Wanstead in Essex, was at that time one of the best astronomical observers in England. A warm attachment sprang up between him and his nephew. He nursed him through the small-pox in 1717; he reinforced the scanty supplies drawn from straitened home; above all, he discerned and cultivated his extraordinary talents. Bradley quickly acquired all his instructor's skill and more than his ardour. Every spare moment was devoted to cooperation with him. His handwriting appears in the Wanstead books from 1715, and the journals of the Royal Society notice a communication from him regarding the aurora of 6 March 1716. He was formally introduced to the learned world by Halley, who, in publishing his observation of an appulse of Palilicium to the moon, 5 Dec. 1717, prophetically described him as 'eruditus juvenis, qui simul industria et ingenio pollens his studiis promovendis aptissimus natus est' (Phil. Trans. xxx. 853). The skill with which he and Pound together deduced from the opposition of Mars in 1719 a solar parallax between 9" and 13", was praised by the same authority (ib. xxxi. 114), who again imparted to the Royal Society 'some very curious observations' made by Bradley on Mars in October 1721, implying a parallax for the sun of less than 10" (Journal Books R. Soc. 16 Nov. 1721). The entry of one of these states that 'the 15-feet tube was moved by a machine that made it to keep pace with the stars' (Bradley, Miscellaneous Works, p. 350), a remarkably early attempt at giving automatic movement to a telescope.

Doubtless with the view of investigating annual parallax, Bradley noted the relative positions of the component stars of γ Virginis, 12 March 1718, and of Castor, 30 March 1719 and 1 Oct. 1722. A repetition of this latter observation about 1769 brought the discovery of their orbital revolution almost within his grasp, and, transmitted by Maskelyne to Herschel, served to confirm and correct its theory (Phil. Trans. xciii. 363).

Bradley's first sustained research, however, was concerned with the Jovian system. He early began to calculate the tabular errors of each eclipse observed, and the collation of older observations with his own afforded him the discovery that the irregularities of the three inner satellites (rightly attributed to their mutual attraction) recur in the same order after 437 days. His 'Corrected Tables' were finished in 1718, but, though printed in the following year with Halley's 'Planetary Tables,' remained unpublished until 1749, by which time they had become obsolete. The appended 'Remarks' (Works, p. 81), describing the 437-day cycle, are stated by the minutes to have been read before the Royal Society 2 July 1719. Bradley was then already a fellow; he was elected 6 Nov. 1718, on the motion of Halley, and under the presidential sanction of Newton.

The choice of a profession meantime be-