CHAPTER ONEWhat Is 3D Printing?
History is replete with examples of technologies that were invented long before they were widely used. Ethanol fuels were used to power Model T Fords in 1908, many decades before they transformed the automotive sector in Brazil in the 1970s and the rest of the world thereafter. The Internet was created in the late 1960s, 30 years before it entered mainstream business and changed so much of what we do. 3D printing is another one of those technologies. For millennia, making something involved taking materials away from an initial quantity, whether it was whittling a spear from a stick, carving a marble block into the form of Hercules, or producing an intricate table leg on a lathe. Those techniques are all “reductive” because they removed material from an initial volume, and today include drilling, milling, cutting, and molding materials into the final required form latterly termed “formative” manufacturing. Then in 1984 that all changed.
It will surprise many who might be unfamiliar with 3D printing to find that it is over 30 years old. In 1980, when companies had only just started using desktop computers to help with engineering and business processes, Dr. Hideo Kodama of the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute in Japan (Figure 1.1) developed an idea: to expose a vat of photosensitive resin to an ultraviolet (UV) beam that hardens a layer of the illuminated liquid, and then to build up the layers to form a solid object. He applied for ...