How was 3d printing invented

• 3D printing has existed in concept since 1945 and in practice—however primitive—since 1971, proposing a faster and more efficient method of making things.
• Concurrent development of 3D-printing technology down to consumer use and up to enterprise use has realized the benefits of 3D printing in construction, architecture, design, manufacturing, and other industries.
• Continuing advancements in additive manufacturing technology and 3D-printable materials, especially new metal alloys, will contribute to further growth.
• In the future, look for new 3D-printing applications in the aerospace, electronics, medical, energy, and automotive industries.

What technology is 80 years old in theory, 40 years old in practice, and looks brand new? Believe it or not, it’s 3D printing.

Although the craze for desktop 3D printers began around 2010, when companies like MakerBot made investors and the media salivate, those in manufacturing know that the process—applying material onto a substrate to build up an object from a digital 3D design—goes back much further.

The first patent for a process called a Liquid Metal Recorder dates to the 1970s, but the idea is much older. In 1945, a prescient short story by Murray Leinster called “Things Pass By” describes the process of feeding “magnetronic plastics—the stuff they make houses and ships of nowadays—into this moving arm. It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes.” What in Leinster’s day was science fiction soon became a reality.

Layers of Innovation: A 3D-Printing Timeline

Inkjet technology was invented by the Teletype Corporation in the 1960s, a method of “pulling” a drop of material from a nozzle using electronics. It resulted in a device capable of printing up to 120 characters per second and ultimately paved the way for consumer desktop printing.

Teletype later experimented with melted wax as described in a 1971 patent belonging to Johannes F. Gottwald, whose idea was to output an object made of liquified metal that solidified into a shape predetermined by the inkjet’s movement upon each new layer. This device was the Liquid Metal Recorder, which is the basis of rapid prototyping and posited that “printing” could move beyond ink.

Those were the baby steps into a territory called the material extrusion process, where thermoplastic is fed into a heated nozzle and laid upon an object one “slice” at a time in sequence—the same technique used in consumer desktop 3D printers. It’s speedy and cheap, but the materials (essentially rubbery plastic) aren’t good for much beyond model R2-D2s and racing cars.

In 1980, Dr. Hideo Kodama, a lawyer working for a public research institute in the city of Nagoya, Japan, described two methods for Gottwald’s vision using thermoset polymer—a special plastic that hardens in response to light—instead of metal. His research was published in several papers and resulted in his own November 1981 patent, but a complete lack of interest meant the project went nowhere.

Regardless, the seed was sown. Electronics and defense manufacturer Raytheon filed a patent in 1982 to use powdered metal to add layers to an object. In 1984, entrepreneur Bill Masters filed a patent for a process called Computer Automated Manufacturing Process and System, which mentioned the term 3D printing for the first time. Another 1984 patent in France described additive manufacturing using stereolithography, but like Kodama’s work, it was disregarded as having no commercial appeal.

After all these starts, inventor Chuck Hull was the first person to actually build a 3D printer. Based on his patent for curing photopolymers using radiation, particles, a chemical reaction, or lasers, his design sent the spatial data from a digital file to the extruder of a 3D printer to build up the object one layer at a time.

Hull’s company, 3D Systems Corporation, released the world’s first stereolithographic apparatus (SLA) machine, the SLA-1, in 1987. This machine made it possible to fabricate complex parts, layer by layer, in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Hull went on to file more than 60 patents around the technology, becoming the godfather of the rapid prototyping movement and inventing the STL file format that’s still in use today.

During this era, 3D printing was an emerging technology, and materials science wasn’t what it is today. If the product was made of popular polymers, they tended to warp as it set. At the time, the machines also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so 3D printing devices were installed only in heavy manufacturing plants—far out of the reach of consumers.

Amid widespread worries that the Y2K bug would shut down computer systems and cause digital Armageddon, 3D printing showed great potential for many industries.

During this period, bioengineering was also making important advances. Scientists at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC, printed the building blocks of a human urinary bladder using additive manufacturing and coating the organ with cells from the patient so the body was unlikely to reject the 3D-printed bladder.

The next decade saw many advances in medical 3D printing as scientists, technologists and doctors built a miniature kidney, a complex prosthetic leg, and the first bioengineered blood vessels made using donated human cells.

But the entire movement—especially the drive toward consumer use—received a big boost from the open-source paradigm sweeping the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. In 2005, Adrian Bowyer’s RepRap Project launched an open-source initiative to create a 3D printer that could build itself—or at least print most of its own parts.

The 1.0 Darwin machine was the first practical application of RepRap’s philosophy, and suddenly anyone had the power to create whatever they could dream up. Launched around the same time, Kickstarter gave home 3D printing another huge boost as crowdfunded projects sprung up everywhere. Manufacturing was democratizing fast.

Commercial 3D printing finally came to the desktop in 2006 from Objet (now Stratasys), which let users send designs to its device in order to print them from multiple materials with different properties.

Marketplaces and virtual swap meets for trading, sharing, and acquiring designs sprung up everywhere, driving a huge groundswell of interest. When MakerBot arrived in 2009 with open-source DIY kits to design and print just about anything, it made co-founder Bre Pettis into a superstar and gave 3D printing the same cachet as past emerging technologies like social media, e-commerce, and even the Web itself.

Today, additive manufacturing is a mature technology. The consumer interest and robustness of industrial platforms grew throughout the 2010s, as the (often hysterical) MakerBot hype settled down and the industry found a groove. Some think additive will replace traditional CNC and milling manufacturing in the future, and a 2021 Lux Research report predicts that 3D printing will be worth $51 billion by 2030.

The plastic desk toys have been cleared away, leaving the real-world benefits 3D printing offers: everything from printing food to applying multiple materials in the same extrusion process, making the process faster and cheaper.

The range of materials available for 3D printing has also grown exponentially, from bioprinting human tissue and the beginnings of organs tailor-made to patients to crafting products from silver or gold.

The applications are also as varied as inventors’ and engineers’ imaginations. Scientists at the University of Southampton flew the world’s first 3D-printed unmanned aircraft; the makers of a 3D-printed car reached up to 200 mpg with a hybrid gas/electric engine; and a start-up specializing in building ecological living structures came up with a robot-made habitat suitable for living on Mars.

3D printing is being used to build emergency shelter in disaster areas and affordable housing in the developing world. And smart robotics, micromanufacturing, and articulated limb design were combined to to make self-powered prosthetics that give feedback to the brain.

A lot of high-end 3D printing in manufacturing for large structures is done using powder-bed fusion, where various materials can be used in powdered form and fused together using lasers or heat. This is the main process used for metal parts, but it’s expensive and needs very particular infrastructure, making it mainly been feasible for the heavy manufacturing sector.

Nevertheless, additive manufacturing has found a home in many industries. The amount of things from your daily life with some 3D-printed component may surprise you.

Construction is a massive, entrenched field with a legacy of wasteful and dangerous practices, responsible for almost 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. 3D printing could upend it with cleaner methods of creating cement-based products like walls and metal components like rebar—and climate change makes these changes even more crucial.

But speed is another compelling reason to adopt 3D printing. In 2016, a Chinese company 3D printed an entire two-story house in 45 days. That same year, Apis Cor 3D printed the structure of a 400-square-foot house in only 24 hours. Additive technologies can also be deployed in precarious places like mine sites or disaster areas quickly and cheaply; research is ongoing to use materials found onsite where printers are located instead of using more fuel and smoke-belching trucks to ship in materials.

The biggest benefits of 3D printing to architecture seem obvious: designs already exist with every conceivable detail in digital form, so when you want to impress clients or investors, simply click a button and have a gorgeous model on your boardroom table just hours later. Want to change a beam, reorient a window, or add another story? Redo your drawings, rinse, and repeat.

When prototypes have to be made in or near the same factories where final production kicks into gear, it adds precious time to the design and review phase of product development if the designer and manufacturer are located far apart.

With access to 3D printing, it doesn’t matter how far-flung the factory is; a 3D printer in your office or garage can churn out as many prototypes as you need affordably and quickly, no matter how many design tweaks you have to make.

3D printing has the potential to make manufacturing viable in any region or economic climate, rather than only in the manufacturing hubs of the past 30–40 years.

A lot of manufacturing workflows already have the means to retool to additive processes. And as the product-design timeline is compressed further thanks to advances such as generative design and the easier transport and repurposing of design files, prototyping and production will happen faster, all at the speed of digital.

Early consumer 3D printing also promised to help reduce waste through a little less built-in obsolescence. If the broken part in an old vacuum cleaner isn’t in production anymore, but the design file for it still exists on the manufacturer’s website, you only have to send it to your desktop device and watch a quick YouTube video to learn how to install it.

According to Statista, the global additive manufacturing market is expected to grow 17% annually through 2023, as the applications for the technology increases and metal additive becomes more and more viable. And the market for additive manufacturing products and services is expected to almost triple between 2020 and 2026.

Industries such as manufacturing, architecture, and product design are surely reaping the benefits of 3D printing, but some of the greatest growth is expected in the electronics, aerospace, and medical industries. Todd Spurgeon, additive manufacturing project engineer for America Makes, says the electronics industry will see things like custom heat sinks for high-end products, and the aerospace industry will see a larger availability of 3D-printed components that will make their way from higher-end military applications to general aviation. In the medical industry, as more materials are evaluated for medical applications and insurance companies more broadly recognize additive manufacturing, personalized care will become the norm.

“Gone may be the days of the one-size-fits-most expensive prosthetic,” Spurgeon says. “Soon, personalized prosthetics, custom-fit to the user, are expected to be within the reach of the typical American household—even for growing children.”

Beyond the existing technologies, there is much more on the horizon for additive manufacturing. According to Spurgeon, interesting work is being done in the direct-ink-writing and dense paste material extrusion communities. For example, research groups are exploring mixing cured photopolymers with advanced material systems such as ceramics and thermosets, which can ultimately be used for things like printed circuits, lower-cost heat exchangers, and nonbulk ceramics.

“Improvements in this domain could result in a larger insertion of additive manufacturing into high-end applications such as aerospace and automotive, as well as large production processes such as the desalinization of water,” Spurgeon says. Even more opportunities surface when you consider this technology in conjunction with other additive-manufacturing modalities, such as printed circuits integrated into the structure of prosthetics or new form factors for batteries.

The list of 3D-printable materials is growing, as well. “Refractory super alloys will enable innovations in the energy, aerospace, and defence sectors,” Spurgeon says. “More durable polymers are being developed today that are likely to meet flame, smoke, and toxicity testing required by the FAA, which will result in sustainment costs reduction for relevant sectors.”

With new research and developments in additive manufacturing on the rise, the future remains bright for 3D printing—so bright that it’s time to don your new 3D-printed shades.

This article has been updated. It was originally published in September 2014. Dana Goldberg contributed to this article.

About the Author

After growing up knowing he wanted to change the world, Drew Turney realized it was easier to write about other people changing it instead. He writes about technology, cinema, science, books, and more.

Content by Drew Turney

The night 3D printing was born: the story of inventor Chuck Hull

The night that 3D printing was born
3D printing

the story of inventor Chuck Hull

March 9, 1983, San Gabriel, California. In the evening, the telephone rang at Engineer Hull's house. Antoinette picked up the phone and heard her husband's excited voice. Mrs. Hull was not too surprised by the call - her husband was constantly late at work until late at night. But instead of the usual apologies, the engineer insistently asked his wife to drop everything and urgently come to the laboratory. Antoinette stood in her pajamas and was already getting ready for bed, but she could not refuse. She only replied, "It's in your best interest to make it worth my attention."

New Gutenberg

The night 3D printing was born.
Part 1

In the early 1980s, the US economy was in recession: unemployment was rising, incomes were falling, and a third of industrial enterprises were idle. The economic crisis shook faith in traditional technologies - enterprises needed modernization, unexpected and fresh solutions. It was obvious to everyone that the future belongs to computers and microelectronics - it remains to find people who would combine IT technologies and conveyor production. The world needed inventors again.

In 1983, Charles "Chuck" Hull worked for Ultraviolet Products (UVP). Unlike the eccentric geniuses of that era, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, distinguished by anything but patience, Chuck did not seek to conquer the world at all costs. His path to invention was reminiscent of the life of Johannes Gutenberg, a German jeweler and minter whose inquisitive mind led to the creation of the first printing press. Like Gutenberg, until the age of 40, Hull was a typical modern "craftsman" - an engineer with a good university education and a standard career. After traveling around the country, in the late 70s, Chuck and his family settled in San Gabriel, a small town in California, where he took the position of vice president of UVP development.

Ultraviolet Products focused on ultraviolet solutions: equipment, lamps, photosensitive polymers. Furniture factories bought UVP technologies - such materials replaced conventional varnishes and paints for wood. A special polymer was applied to a countertop or wood slab and then cured under ultraviolet light. It turned out a strong plastic frame, an analogue of wood veneer.

While testing another polymer, Chuck Hull wondered what would happen if successive exposure to ultraviolet light was applied to not one, but several layers of the polymer.

At UVP, Hull worked on the production of those UV curing furniture paints. While testing the next polymer, Chuck Hull thought: what would happen if not one, but several layers of plastic were successively exposed to ultraviolet radiation. If the layers are formed by curing them in turn with UV radiation, it is possible to arrange a plastic product of absolutely arbitrary shape. For this, it is necessary that the process be controlled by a computer - then the probability of marriage will be negligible. This is how the first idea to combine computer modeling and photochemistry appeared.

Post-apocalyptic
kluge

The night 3D printing was born.
Part 2

Chuck needed a lab to get started. With only service equipment on hand, the engineer turned to his boss for help. The UVP president didn't share his subordinate's enthusiasm: after all, his firm makes ultraviolet lamps, not Star Trek replicators. If Hull wants to invent, let him do it in his spare time. So they agreed: during the day, Hull performed direct duties, while he devoted his nights and weekends to independent research.

The first 3D printer turned out to be a kludge — that's what technicians call mindless-looking but workable junk.

The engineer was assigned a small room for research. It was there that 3D printing was born in experimental pains. Chuck set up equipment, tested polymers, and wrote programs. Hull later admitted that, as a discoverer, he made every mistake he could. But after months of work, Chuck was lucky - the inventor finally designed a working system in which an ultraviolet lamp illuminated a container of photopolymer.

Hull wrote the code that tells the printer how many layers to use on his own. Therefore, initially the device could only produce structures of a very simple form. And in appearance, the world's first 3D printer did not shine with grace. Chuck described it with the word “kluge,” the technical term for mindless-looking but workable junk: “The 3D printer looked post-apocalyptic, like a piece of equipment from the Water World movie.

March 9, 1983 is considered the birth date of 3D printing - on this day, Hull's "monster" produced something similar to the first 3D model. Then Chuck, as usual, stayed up late in the laboratory, experimenting with the settings of the device. Recently, the polymer, although it hardened evenly, turned into spaghetti due to the low sintering of the layers. But not at this time. The settings were correct, the kluge did not fail, and after 45 minutes of buzzing, the device reproduced a small bowl.

Hull recalled in an interview: “I called it the eye cup because it looked like the eyedropper my wife wore all the time. It appeared to Antoinette as a communion cup. It must have been God directing my efforts.” But Chuck didn't exactly feel like a monk that night, more like a medieval alchemist who created a piece of gold from liquid slime.

The accomplished “father of 3D printing” called his wife and urgently asked her to come to the laboratory. In response, he heard Antoinette's angry voice: "It is in your interest that this be worth my attention." As his wife entered, Chuck showed off the first 3D printed object. It was an ordinary cup, unremarkable, except for the circular sections on the walls. Years later, Antoinette recounted the events of that night: “He held this cup in his hand and said, “I did it, now the world will never be the same.” We laughed and cried and stayed up all night just fantasizing about the future.”

First patent

The night 3D printing was born.
Part 3

Hull called his brainchild stereolithography: “I sat at night and tried to come up with a name for a new technology. I wanted the title to necessarily include the term "lithography", as a synonym for printing, and the Greek word "stereo", which means "volumetric", "spatial". Then I just put those two words together.”

U.S. Patent 4,575,330 titled "Apparatus for creating three-dimensional objects using stereolithography" was filed August 8, 1984 years old.

Convinced of the viability of the method, Chuck worked on the device in his small laboratory. A year later, he managed to bring the development to patenting: “As soon as I got a normally working machine, I immediately turned to a lawyer. He wrote a document for the patent office." U.S. Patent 4,575,330 entitled "Apparatus for creating three-dimensional objects using stereolithography" was filed August 8, 1984. In the application, Chuck described stereolithography as a technique for creating solid objects by successively printing thin layers of material and treating them with ultraviolet radiation. Hull was listed as the author of the development, the rights to the invention were transferred to UVP.

The largest manufacturer of 3D printers in the world could well have been called Ultraviolet Products, but it turned out differently. The company was affected by the economic crisis - sales fell sharply, and in order to preserve the core business, the management decided to sacrifice promising areas. During a meeting with the president, the inventor insisted on continuing research, but he could not allocate funds for the refinement of the apparatus and marketing. Then Hull suggested that the boss register a new company and become partners: overall management and promotion fell on the shoulders of Chuck, while the president was entitled to a share of the profits. Seeing the seriousness of the intentions of the already former subordinate, the boss agreed and ceded the license to the invention to Hull.

Founding of 3D Systems

The night 3D printing was born.
Part 4

In 1986, the partners founded the first 3D printer company and named it 3D Systems. Since Chuck had never been in business, he had to put in a lot of time and effort to get his name out there: “I was calm about the technology, I never doubted that 3D printing would become popular. But I was never very confident in myself, so at first it was difficult. He attended scientific forums, consulted with colleagues from leading US universities, traveled to social events to make useful contacts. His activity paid off - a Canadian investor agreed to invest $6 million in 3D Systems.

The first mass-produced 3D printer was released in 1987 and was named SLA-1.

Refinement of the original device to marketable form lasted another year, until 1987. The first mass-produced 3D printer was named SLA-1. The huge and heavy cabinet was not very suitable for presentations, so Hull recorded short videos to demonstrate the capabilities of the 3D printer: “These films were quite corny, but we got a huge response from our customers. ”

Hull had high hopes for automakers. In the 1980s, the US auto industry lagged far behind Japan's, and American companies were desperate for a secret weapon. They became a 3D printer. With the help of 3D printing, engineers could quickly prototype small parts such as door handles and gear levers. Hull's predictions were fully justified: General Motors and Mercedes-Benz soon introduced stereolithography for the manufacture and testing of prototypes.

American companies were desperate for a secret weapon. They became a 3D printer.

Hull later found out that 3D printing was applicable not only to liquids, but also to any gradually solidifying materials that could change their physical state. Over the course of several years, he patented dozens of new solutions and technologies, including STL, a new data format for digital models. This format represents the object as a set of triangular faces and supports layering.

Despite the success of 3D Systems, the invention of 3D printing did not initially cause the industrial revolution that computers did. The real boom in additive manufacturing (as well as the recognition of the merits of the inventor himself) occurred later, in the 21st century. But fame and fame never bothered Hull - he was always distinguished by patience. At one time, the developer told his wife that 3D printing technology will take 25-30 years to take its rightful place in the market, but after that it will play an important role in the industry. Both of Hull's predictions turned out to be correct.

Today, 3D Systems is one of the largest 3D printer manufacturers in the world with a market capitalization of $1.1 billion. 78-year-old Chuck Hull continues to work in his native company, combining the positions of executive vice president and chief engineer. He has over 100 patents in the US, Europe and Japan, including 7 3D printing technologies. In 2014, Hull was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame, placing his name alongside other notables such as Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, and the Wright brothers.

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