 The Ribbon Machine surpassed any previous attempts to automate bulb production and was used to produce incandescent bulbs into the 21st century.The inventor, William Woods, along with his colleague at Corning Glass Works, David E. Gray, had created a machine that by 1939 was turning out 1,000 bulbs per minute.The Ribbon Machine works by passing a continuous ribbon of glass along a conveyor belt, heated in a furnace, and then blown by precisely aligned air nozzles through holes in the conveyor belt into molds.