History of 3D Printing

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.

Layers of Innovation: A 3D-Printing Timeline

1971–1999: The First 3D Printer Emerges

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.

Material Extrusion Process

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.

1999–2010: 3D Printing Shows Its Potential

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.

2011–Present Day: 3D Printing in Its Prime

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.