Bradley & Hubbard: The Lamp Company That Never Trademarked Its Own Name

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

Nathaniel Bradley and his brother-in-law Walter Hubbard started casting lamp parts in Meriden, Connecticut, and by the 1890s the company had patented 238 separate designs and mechanisms — a figural lamp base, a self-righting shade holder, a burner that wouldn't let its own wick smoke the room. What the company never seems to have bothered registering was its own name. Sixty years after it closed for good, a different company tried to claim "Bradley & Hubbard" as a federal trademark, got it, and let it lapse within a decade.

What a Bradley & Hubbard lamp actually is

"Bradley & Hubbard" on a lamp usually means one of two things: a cast-metal base — often brass or bronze-finished iron, sometimes built around a figural element like an animal or a human form — or a shade made of slag glass, a marbled, semi-opaque glass cast in thick panels and set into a metal overlay frame rather than leaded like a Tiffany shade. The company made both kinds for decades, converted plenty of its own kerosene lamps to electricity as that technology arrived, and built the same catalog of parts into clocks, andirons, bookends, match safes, inkwells and doorstops along the way — the firm's doorstops alone are collected seriously enough to have earned the nickname "the Tiffany of doorstops" among specialists.

This guide covers the lamps specifically: the kerosene and oil lamps of the 1860s through 1890s, the electrified parlor and library lamps of the early 1900s, and the slag-glass panel shades that put the company in direct competition with its own neighbors for a market Tiffany Studios was also selling into, at a higher price, from a different state.

Two brothers-in-law and a foundry in Meriden

Nathaniel L. Bradley and Walter Hubbard, brothers-in-law, began manufacturing cast-iron and brass goods in Meriden, Connecticut in the 1850s: clocks, tables, frames, andirons, lamps, chandeliers and, for a time, sewing machines. The partnership formally incorporated as the Bradley & Hubbard Manufacturing Company, and by 1895 it had grown from six employees to roughly 1,500 workers occupying nearly seven acres of floor space under brick roofs — a scale that, by the 1890s, made the Bradley & Hubbard name, in the words of Smithsonian curator Richard E. Stamm, synonymous with quality and artistic merit in American decorative metalwork.

Meriden itself was not incidental to that growth. The city had so many metal-goods manufacturers by the late nineteenth century that it marketed itself as "The Silver City," and Bradley & Hubbard shared it with at least three other companies that made the same category of slag-glass panel lamp — a fact this guide returns to in the look-alikes section below, because it means a shade and a base from two different Meriden firms can end up married on the same lamp with no fraud involved at all.

Three patents across thirty years

Three of the company's patents, spaced thirty years apart, trace its range from decorative figure to working mechanism. The earliest, a design patent granted January 16, 1872 to David Mosman and assigned to Bradley & Hubbard, covers a cast lamp-base figure of a boy seated beside a dog resting its forepaws on the boy's leg — purely ornamental, meant for the lower portion of a lamp standard, and typical of the figural bases the company built its early reputation on.

The second patent belongs to the founder himself. Nathaniel L. Bradley's US Patent 228,594, filed April 16, 1880 and granted that June 8, covers a spring-based shade holder: rather than a rigid screw collar, two or more springs attach to the shade ring and hook the shade's lower edge from the inside, so that a shade knocked out of position springs back rather than cracking. It is a small mechanical fix for a problem every glass-shaded lamp has, patented by the man whose name is on the company door.

The third, US Patent 692,701, was filed January 15, 1901 by William Allen Penfield and granted February 4, 1902, assigned to Bradley & Hubbard. It solves a different problem: an oil lamp smokes when its wick is wound up too high, so Penfield built a vertically movable chimney gallery with a toothed stop collar that physically blocks the wick from climbing past a safe height, locked in place with a bayonet-style twist mechanism that can still be released for lighting. Between a decorative figure, a founder's own fix for a broken shade, and a named engineer's fix for a smoking wick, the three patents cover design, mechanism and chemistry's own byproduct — soot — in roughly the order a growing manufacturer would need to solve them.

How to tell a real one

A genuine Bradley & Hubbard lamp almost always carries a mark somewhere on the metal: a triangular logo with a lamp inside it, the letters "B&H" or "B & H" cast or stamped into the base, or the fuller "Bradley & Hubbard Mfg Co." spelled out, sometimes trailing a partial year ("...189"). A model number frequently rides alongside the maker's mark — collectors have reported bases numbered in the low hundreds up through the high thousands, consistent with a company that, by its own account, patented 238 distinct designs over nine decades. On an oil lamp converted to electricity, check that the conversion itself reads as old work: a socket that matches the fitting's own finish and wear, rather than a bright modern replacement, is a better sign of age than the mark alone.

A cast or stamped patent date is its own authentication point, independent of the maker's mark. Auction houses cataloging Bradley & Hubbard slag-glass lamps have recorded marks reading "Patented Oct. 20, 1908" on at least one surviving example — a date that, whether or not it maps to a single patent this guide independently verified, narrows the lamp to a specific window the way a trademark's first-use date narrows a brand name. An earlier marking convention, "PAT. APPLD FOR," appears on lamps made before a given application had actually been granted, and dates the piece to the filing window rather than the grant.

The other Meriden makers, and a costlier name

Bradley & Hubbard was not the only slag-glass lamp maker working the same few blocks of Meriden, Connecticut in the early twentieth century. Edward Miller & Company, a direct local competitor, marked its own lamps "Miller" or "Edward Miller" with a model number, and built a reputation for floral and foliate cast bases that collectors today treat as a more affordable entry point into the category. Pittsburgh Lamp, Brass & Glass Company, working from a different city entirely, marked pieces "PLB&G" or in full, and favored bronze-finished bases with classical motifs under warm caramel- and amber-toned panels. Handel & Company, also Meriden-based, is best known today for its reverse-painted glass shades, but it made slag-glass panel lamps too, stamping its signature inside the shade's rim and on the base — and because Handel's slag examples are scarcer than its painted ones, they tend to command a premium over comparable Bradley & Hubbard pieces rather than the other way around.

The confusion collectors actually run into most often, though, isn't with another Meriden maker — it's with Tiffany. A slag-glass panel lamp and a true Tiffany Studios leaded-glass lamp solve the same basic problem, colored light through a built-up shade, with different techniques and very different price ceilings: Tiffany's shades are built from hundreds of individually cut, copper-foiled glass pieces, where a Bradley & Hubbard slag panel is a handful of thick, pre-cast glass sections set into a stamped metal overlay. A shade that looks the part in a dim booth is worth checking for the construction difference before either name gets attached to it; this shop's own guide to spotting the difference goes into that distinction directly.

Maker	Where it's marked	Distinguishing feature
Bradley & Hubbard	Base, shade frame	Triangular lamp logo or "B&H"; often a model number plus a cast patent date
Edward Miller & Co.	Base or shade cap	"Miller" or "Edward Miller" plus model number; floral/foliate cast bases, generally the most affordable of the four
Handel & Co.	Inside the shade rim AND the base	Better known for reverse-painted shades; its scarcer slag-panel examples outprice comparable B&H pieces
Pittsburgh Lamp, Brass & Glass Co.	Base, as "PLB&G" or in full	Bronze-finish bases, classical motifs, warm caramel/amber panel tones

What they sell for

Five realized Bradley & Hubbard lamp prices, each tied to a dated auction rather than an asking price, show a wide spread depending on lamp type and condition rather than any single market floor. A plain three-light, eight-panel slag-glass lamp sold for $190 at Circle Auction's November 23, 2019 sale. A pair of slag-glass lamps together brought $350 (hammer, below a $500–$700 estimate) at Brunk Auctions on June 25, 2025 — roughly $175 apiece, the lowest per-lamp figure of the five. A hexagonal gilt-metal-overlay slag lamp dated circa 1908 made $550 at Simpson Galleries on May 20, 2023. An earlier, non-slag figural piece — a No. 952 kerosene stand lamp with a cast Native American figural stem, dated circa 1883 — brought $461.25 (with buyer's premium) against a $200–$300 estimate at Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates on January 18, 2024, nearly doubling its high estimate on five bids. The strongest result of the five was a leaded slag-glass "Prairie" lamp that brought $960 at John Moran Auctioneers on May 17, 2011.

A separate figure isn't a sale at all and is labeled as such: a reverse- or interior-painted Bradley & Hubbard panel lamp, dated circa 1908 by its own cast patent mark, was appraised at $4,000 retail replacement value on a 2004 episode of Antiques Roadshow. That number describes what the appraiser believed the piece would cost to replace at retail in 2004, not what it sold for, and the gap between it and the five auction results above is exactly the gap between a retail estimate and a hammer price — both real, neither interchangeable with the other.

A name that outlived the company by sixty years

The Charles Parker Company, another Meriden manufacturer, bought Bradley & Hubbard outright in 1940, ending its 88-year run as an independent business. Charles Parker itself kept operating for another three decades, exhibiting as late as 1973 before going defunct around 1975 — so the buyer outlived the company it bought by roughly as long as Bradley & Hubbard had been patenting lamp mechanisms in the first place.

No federal trademark registration from Bradley & Hubbard's own working life turned up in the record searched for this guide, despite the company's 238 patented designs and devices — a pattern that would make sense for a firm that competed on cast ornament and mechanism rather than a single branded word the way, say, Thermos or Aladdin did. The registration that does exist for the name is a much later and much shorter one: on December 29, 1999, a company called United Mercantile, LLC filed to register "BRADLEY & HUBBARD MFG. CO." as a US trademark, covering lamps and lampshades, claiming first use in commerce on June 30, 2002. The mark was registered February 25, 2003 as Reg. No. 2,691,333 — and cancelled under Section 8 on October 3, 2009, for failing to file the paperwork that keeps a registration in force. For six years, a name an 1852 Connecticut foundry never bothered to federally claim belonged, on paper, to an entirely different company; today it belongs to no one.

Where the records disagree

Sources disagree on exactly when the business started and when it took the Bradley & Hubbard name. Wikipedia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's own catalog record, and the Smithsonian's 2010–2012 exhibition description all give 1852 as the founding year and 1940 as the end, a clean 88-year span. A separate, independently sourced account — repeated by a vintage-lighting history site and, separately, by the appraiser on a 2004 Antiques Roadshow segment — places the start of manufacturing in 1854 and says the partnership didn't formally incorporate as the Bradley & Hubbard Manufacturing Company until 1874 or 1875. Both versions could be true at once: a business operating informally from 1852 or 1854, incorporated under its lasting name two decades later. This guide gives both because neither source corroborates the other directly, and because the 88-year figure that several institutions repeat only works cleanly if 1852, not 1854, is the start date they mean.

The 1999–2009 trademark registration is clear on its own four key dates — filed, registered, first use claimed, cancelled — but silent on everything else that would explain it: nothing in the public registration record says who United Mercantile, LLC was, why it chose a name retired six decades earlier, or why the registration lapsed rather than being renewed. This guide reports the dates as filed and does not speculate about the company behind them.

For more on the Tiffany-versus-everyone-else confusion this guide's look-alikes section only touches on, see this shop's guide to Tiffany lamp vs. Tiffany-style. For another American lighting maker with its own federal trademark fight over its own name, see the guide to the Aladdin mantle lamp. For the rest of the Field Guides library, see the Field Guides index.