Another 1984 patent in France described additive manufacturing using stereolithography, but like Kodama’s work, it was disregarded as having no commercial appeal. 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. Electronics and defense manufacturer Raytheon filed a patent in 1982 to use powdered metal to add layers to an object. 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. 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. Plans to print objects using liquified metal date to the 1970s, but practical metal additive manufacturing is much more recent-and will impact many more industries as new 3D-printable alloys become available. It’s speedy and cheap, but the materials (essentially rubbery plastic) aren’t good for much beyond model R2-D2s and racing cars.
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. This device was the Liquid Metal Recorder, which is the basis of rapid prototyping and posited that “printing” could move beyond ink. 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. Teletype later experimented with melted wax as described in a 1971 patent belonging to Johannes F. It resulted in a device capable of printing up to 120 characters per second and ultimately paved the way for consumer desktop printing. Inkjet technology was invented by the Teletype Corporation in the 1960s, a method of “pulling” a drop of material from a nozzle using electronics.
Layers of Innovation: A 3D-Printing Timeline 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. It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells.
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. The first patent for a process called a Liquid Metal Recorder dates to the 1970s, but the idea is much older. 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.Īlthough 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.