Of William Bullock's several inventions, his web rotary printing press is by far his most significant and enduring. Though several other men made improvements on the press both before and after Bullock, the innovations he made in the nineteenth century were incorporated into the printing process well into the twentieth century.

The printing press of Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century set the format for presses until the 1840's, when Richard March Hoe changed from the flatbed to the faster rotary press and used steam power instead of manual labor or the foot treadle to operate the mechanisms. Bullock improved on Hoe's invention, which, though more advanced than Gutenberg's, still printed only one page at a time using a back-and-forth motion of the type bed. Bullock conceived of a machine that had two pairs of cylinders. Two stereotype (or type) cylinders held the raised letter type; two impression cylinders pressed the paper against the type to print the copy or images.

Bullock's early machine moved the sheets of paper on tapes to the impression cylinder, which pressed the paper against the inked type. Later, he devised a way for the paper, in strips measuring five or six linear miles, to be rolled on huge rollers. The paper would pass through a spray to moisten it before printing, and it would be fed into the printing process. As the type was printed on the roll paper, which was called a web, Bullock fashioned a mechanism that would cut the paper from the continuous roll by using a serrated knife attached to the cylinders. The knife, designed so that it rarely needed sharpening, cut the paper with fast strokes into newspaper page sheets. Once cut, the sheets were moved along by grippers and tapes to be delivered on belts and grabbed by automatic metal fingers as each sheet left the final printing cylinder. The press was also capable of folding the sheets into the final format.

The earliest versions of the sheet cutting and delivery system were somewhat unreliable, but Bullock soon ironed out the problems. The improvements he made to his machine soon compelled other printers to use his press. The increased speed of Bullock's press, its efficient use of the continuous roll of paper, and several other innovative changes he made eliminated the tedious hand-feeding of paper. When the stereotype printing process was invented, the rotary press process became even better. With it, type was produced in a flexible mold made of papier-mache and could thus be bent to fit around the cylindrical forms that Bullock's press used. As a result, the web rotary printing press made it possible for newspaper publishers to produce more issues at a faster rate at less cost and for greater profit and popularity. Bullock's press was the beginning of the modern-day web-fed newspaper press.

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