May all your Christmases be Shiny and Brite
Every year, about three weeks before Christmas, my dad would pull down the ladder steps that led to our attic and bring down the gigantic cardboard box that held our Christmas decorations. My sister and brothers and I couldn’t wait to decorate our live blue spruce in its special place in the corner of our living room.
As we peered into the huge box we rediscovered our Christmas stockings, strings of multi-colored lights, my older brother’s Lionel 027 trains, a wooden Nativity set and, last but not least, three green and brown boxes filled with Shiny Brite ornaments. We’d unwrap the tissue paper that protected each ornament as we told each other which one was our absolute favorite.
It wasn’t until recently that I discovered the fascinating and almost forgotten story of the town of Wellsboro, Pa., which produced these beautiful ornaments. It begins with a glassblower from western Pennsylvania who set out to modernize lightbulb production. But he also, unknowingly, laid the foundation for a Christmas ornament empire.
A brite young man
In 1879, Thomas Edison had successfully perfected the first practical and durable filament for the electric lightbulb. In order to meet the growing demand for the glass envelopes that surrounded the filament, in 1916 “Corning Glass purchased a defunct plate glass plant in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, to hand blow glass envelopes for Thomas Edison and Westinghouse,” according to Grant “Skip” Cavanaugh, a 37-year former employee and Technical General Manager at Corning Glass Works, Wellsboro.
Also in 1879, William J. Woods was born in Martinsburg, Pa., about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh. At a young age he decided to pursue his love of glassblowing, and so in 1898 he arrived at Corning Glass Works to perfect his craft. There, Woods assembled a team of glass blowers to produce the bulbs. Skilled glass blowers like Woods, called “gaffers,” could produce two bulbs per minute — extraordinary for a human, but far too slow to
make Edison’s dream of mass production a reality.
In order to produce more bulbs per minute, Corning Glass Works developed the “E” machine in 1907, which was semi-automatic device that improved on hand-blown glass, but not by much, because the workers still had to gather the molten glass by hand. By 1913, it could only produce seven bulbs per minute. Then in 1923 came the fully-automatic rotary “F” machine, which Corning installed at Wellsboro and could produce up to 48 bulbs per minute-long rotation.
During these years of innovation, Woods became a master gaffer and was fascinated with the possibilities of further automation. There are differing accounts of his “eureka” moment, but they all involve his seeing a piece of molten glass that spontaneously formed into a bulb shape by pressing through a small hole. And so he wondered: What if a machine automatically blew light bulb blanks through a hole in a metal plate? The idea of the Ribbon Machine was born.
But who would build it? That monumental task fascinated David E. Gray, the chief mechanical engineer at Corning Glass Works, who worked together with William Woods to develop the machine. This revolutionary device flattened molten glass into a thick, glowing ribbon. The ribbon of glass then moved along a series of square plates, and sunk into a series of holes. A plunger then pushed compressed air into the glass and a series of molds snapped together to form the bulb shape. The Ribbon Machine could produce 400,000 blanks in 24 hours, and Thomas Edison’s dream of lighting up the world was realized.
War takes the shine off Christmas
At the end of the 1930s, German businessman Max Eckhardt, was facing another problem. With the clouds of war gathering, he feared that his stream of German Christmas ornaments would be caught up in a British blockade, and would never reach the United States. At that time, Germany made, by hand, 95% of the 250 million glass Christmas ornaments that were shipped to the United States. Eckhardt knew Corning Glass Works in Wellsboro had the Ribbon Machine, which gave him an idea that would revolutionize his ornament business.
Eckhardt and Bill Thompson, a store manager for F. W. Woolworth, went to Corning Glass Company in 1937 with a proposal to convert their lightbulb blowing Ribbon Machine into one that could produce clear glass round balls for wholesalers to turn into Christmas ornaments. Eckhardt promised F.W. Woolworth would place an order for 235,000 ornaments, and, seeing a perfect opportunity to diversify their product line with a guaranteed market, Corning eagerly accepted the deal.
In December of 1939 Wellboro’s Corning Glass plant shipped its first order of ornaments Woolworth’s Five and Ten-Cent Stores, where they sold for two to ten cents apiece. Because the inside of the ornament was sprayed with silver nitrate so they would always stay shiny and, well, bright, Eckhardt named his new brand of American-made ornaments Shiny Brite.
Icons of Christmas in America
In 1940, the Corning employees at Wellsboro made more than 40 million Shiny Brite ornaments that arrived in stores all over the United States in time for Christmas. With German production and export offline, 90% of the world’s Christmas bulbs were now made at the plant. Wellsboro had become “The Town That Saved Christmas.”
With production at 300,000 ornaments a day, Eckhardt soon opened offices in Hoboken, Irvington, North Bergen and West New York, N.J., to keep up with the demand. By the 1950s, Corning was producing 1,000 ornaments every minute in red, green, gold, pink and blue. As time went on, they
also introduced new shapes like tops, icicles, trees, lanterns, bells and pinecones.
Years later a process known as “shrink wrapping” was applied to the glass ornaments, and Campbell’s Soup, Holly Hobby, Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell and Disney had their own line of detailed, branded ornaments. Clear glass ornaments were also sent to major companies in Gastonia, S.C., Roswell, N.M., and Sparks, Nev., to be decorated. Lord and Taylor painted their own line of ornaments.
Where it all began
The Ribbon Machine had the capacity to produce all types of glass products for Corning, including “glass radio tubes, glass tubes for fluorescent lights, a full line of glass envelopes for domestic, industrial and automotive lights, glass tumblers and votive cups,” remembers Skip Cavanaugh. In 1983, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the Ribbon Machine
as the tenth International Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. This places it on the same level as the steam engine on the list of mechanical devices that have revolutionized society.
Wellsboro continued to make Shiny Brite Christmas ornaments into the 1980s. In 1981 Corning Glass Works became part of GTE. Then in 1993, ironically, the German company Osram purchased it, later transitioning to Osram-Sylvania. The plant closed in 2016 just days three weeks shy of its hundredth birthday.
The Wellsboro plant may no longer be churning out Shiny Brite ornaments, but the memories of my dad bringing down that big box of Christmas decorations will never fade. And now my sister and brothers will have a new story to tell about the history behind our favorite Shiny Brite ornaments that still adorn our trees.