William Bullock

American machinist

• Born: 1813
• Birthplace: Greenville, Greene County, New York
• Died: April 12, 1867
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Bullock’s invention of the web rotary printing press, with its increased speed of operation and efficiency, revolutionized the printing industry.

Primary field: Printing

Primary invention: Web rotary printing press

Early Life

William Bullock was born in 1813 and became an orphan at the age of eight when his father died; an older brother took over raising him. Early on, Bullock developed an interest in mechanics, and he spent his spare time reading on the subject. At the age of nineteen, he married Angeline Kimball in Catskill, Greene County, New York, and two years later he had his own business. In 1835, his first child, a son, was born. During this time, Bullock was not only operating his own machine shop but also experimenting with ideas for improving the traditional but tedious methods and equipment still in use in agriculture and construction. His first practicable invention was a shingle-cutting machine. Between 1838 and 1839, he traveled as far as Savannah, Georgia, to market the device, with no success.

Bullock went to New York City looking for more lucrative, satisfying work. His family was growing, with four sons and two daughters born between 1835 and 1847; his first son, however, had died at age two. While working in New York, Bullock designed several devices, most of which were related to agriculture. One was a lathe-cutting machine. Another was a cotton and hay press. Cotton and hay were important crops at that time, and farmers had to transport them over long distances to sell them. To make the crops easier to handle and transport, Bullock designed a press that could compress deseeded cotton and loose, bulky hay into manageable, compact bales, which the machine was also capable of tying together with wire or heavy twine.

Bullock also invented agrain drill, which was awarded a prize from the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania in 1849. The device had a series of separate round disks that cut little trenches in prepared soil. From its seed hopper, it sent seeds through tubes into the trenches. Spike-toothed drags pulled the soil back into the trenches to cover the seeds. This invention eased the backbreaking labor of planting.

Life’s Work

By 1850, Bullock and his family were living in Philadelphia, where he was editor of a newspaper, The Banner of the Union. Many of the existing printing presses had a flatbed construction and required considerable time and labor for a fairly limited circulation. Bullock began designing a hand-cranked wooden press, to which he later attached an automatic paper feeder. This device would become a crucial component of his most well-known invention, the web rotary printing press.

After Bullock’s wife died in 1850, he moved his family back to Greene County, where he soon married Angeline’s sister Emily. In 1853, when he became editor of a Whig Party paper, The American Eagle, his wife gave birth to a daughter, the first of six children they had together. Bullock continued to work on improving the printing press. He had an even greater incentive to develop an efficient printing press when the man who printed the Whig paper sold his business to a man who refused to print Bullock’s paper. Determined to keep his paper going, Bullock built a wooden flatbed press with a self-feeder and began printing his paper himself.

By 1856, Bullock was ready to move on from Greene County. He sold his newspaper and moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1857, where his son William was born that year. Bullock continued to work on improvements to his printing press, determined to make a machine that could not only print accurately and rapidly but also self-adjust and automatically feed paper. He sought to design a press that could print on both sides of a paper sheet. In 1858, when he felt that he had perfected certain aspects of his machine, he took out a patent on his automatic paper feeder.

Bullock moved to Pittsburgh in 1860, finally satisfied with his machine, which was called the web rotary printing press. Improving on Richard March Hoe’s 1840’s rotary press, Bullock designed his press to feed paper automatically instead of by hand, print on both sides of the paper, and cut and fold the sheets. His machine, a markedly improved press that made the printing process faster and less labor-intensive, could print as many as 12,000 sheets per hour. Newspaper publishers were quickly interested in the new press. In 1860, Bullock was called on to design one for the national publication Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and he built a complete working model for the Cincinnati Times.

Bullock went to England in 1862 to secure a British patent for his press, which was granted that year. In 1865, he built an improved cylindrical rotary printing press in Philadelphia that used a roll of continuous paper. This machine needed only three workers to operate it. Bullock continued to make modifications to his machines, until they could print as many as 30,000 sheets per hour.

On April 3, 1867, in Philadelphia, Bullock was working on one of his new presses that was to be used to print the Public Ledger newspaper, the city’s most popular paper. As he was making an adjustment to the machine, he tried to kick one of the motor driving belts onto a pulley, but he miscalculated. His right leg was caught in the mechanism and badly crushed. Before he could be rescued from the machine, he suffered other injuries that would hamper his recovery. Gangrene developed in his leg, and amputation was considered the only option. He went in for the operation on April 12 and died during the procedure.

Bullock was buried on the North Side in Pittsburgh in the Union Dale Cemetery. Though he did not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his inventions, he had passed on to a trusted workman and confidant many of his ideas for further improving his printing press. Because of that, modifications continued to be made to his presses, making them some of the most successful machines of the era.

Impact

Bullock’s invention of the web rotary printing press marked the beginning of modern newspaper publishing. His machine achieved significant speed, and its automatic paper feeder using a continuous roll did away with the labor-intensive hand-feeding used by previous printing presses. The principles that form the basis of his innovative press were widely adopted for book and newspaper publishing for decades, until the second half of the twentieth century, when the computer caused yet another revolutionary change.

Bibliography

Harris, Elizabeth M. Personal Impressions: The Small Printing Press in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: David R. Godine, 2004. More than one hundred small printing presses and their makers are cataloged, described, and illustrated, giving an overview of the machines and the nineteenth century publishing industry. Useful in providing insight into the era during which Bullock worked.

McClelland, Peter. Sowing Modernity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Bullock is briefly discussed in his capacity as inventor of agricultural machines. A useful source on early American agricultural tools and equipment.

Thomas, Isaiah. The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers. 2 vols. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2008. Written by a leading early nineteenth century publisher and based on his personal research and knowledge of printers from 1640 to 1800, the book offers an important history of the printing “industry” of which Bullock was part.