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How 3D Printers Went Mainstream After Decades In Obscurity
An anonymous reader writes: By now, everyone knows the likes of MakerBot, Bre Pettis, and the gun-printing cage rattlers at Defense Distributed. But the tale of 3D-printing goes all the way back to the heady pre-Macintosh days of 1983, and a simple plastic cup holds the distinction of being the first-ever 3D-printed object. Garage entrepreneur Chuck Hull managed to print it using cobbled-together hardware that looked like something out of Waterworld, laying the fragile plastic framework for everything to come. From retrofitted hot glue guns, to a machine made specifically to print on-demand shot glasses, the last 30 years in 3D printing have been full of strange twists, odd characters and melted failures. And the possibilities are just beginning to emerge now that anyone can play.
Except no ONE person invented it. 3D printing was the result of a lot of researchers working on a lot of parts, and when the dust settled, none of them could build a really practical printer without paying off all the other patent holders, most of whom were playing dog-in-the-manger with their patents while trying to elbow out the competition.
Anybody remember that scene in "A Beautiful Mind" where Nash points out that if everybody goes after the beautiful girl they block each other and nobody gets the girl? Patents on complicated devices are like that. Everybody ends up blocking everybody else and nobody can do much with the technology until the patents expire.
Watching this space, what I think is interesting is how the open source community has helped proliferate the technology, the result has been an explosion of a very wide but shallow market (lots of companies each with a handful of not very perfected features, each with only a few customers). However only in the last year have those products been refined into printers that could be consider something that may make it into consumers hands.
It is a replay of the 1970 computer hobbyist scene. We are waiting for a few companies like an Apple, Microsoft or IBM to narrow the market again and get deeper penetration. This isn't a bad thing, as the expectations congeal around a minimum feature set (multicolor, automatic dissolvable scaffolding, WYSIWYG software, variable resolution to improve speeds, improved detail using feed-back loops, etc), only a few companies will be able to compete with the kind of hit-a-button-and-get-a-perfect-print-everytime experience that will take this from a garage experiment to a practical user experience. Those companies will get more mindshare, and be able to sell deeper into the market at a mass-produced price point.
Still most of the printer has pretty variable results. It turns out it takes a while to perfect the little details. It is the normal arc of technology, not just patents expiring.
Funny how at the start of the US patent system toward the end of the 18th century, patents expired in 28 years. Back then the pace of innovation was glacially slow compared to today. Today, when technological progress happens several orders of magnitude faster, patents now expire in only 28 years. Thanks to Disney, copyrights can last even longer. We live in a truly amazong world! How about 5 years for patents and for trademarks 5 years or as long as they're actively being used?
"When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain
I suspect cheap and huge computers had a large effect too. I haven't done a 3D print, but the app that slices an object for printing and plans the head path probably takes a significant amount of CPU and RAM. The printer could easily have been built in the 80s, but only recently have home computers become powerful enough to drive them.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.