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.

Comments

How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired.

[HeckRuler]

Their patents expired. It was hip new technology in the 1980's with a lot of industrial researchers making exciting new tools and generally doing what patents encourage.

But there was only niche use for it, and the cost of all the overlapping patents stifled the market for 30 years. You couldn't sell a 3D printer without paying homage (and a fuckton of cash) to the inventors back in the 80's.

Those patents are expiring and now making, selling, and operating 3D printers is economically viable for the general populace and not just niche tool shops with a big wad of cash. Without the burden that those patents created, the technology was allowed to go mainstream.

Kinda makes you wonder if existence of patents are such a good idea in the first place.

I thought this was common knowledge.

Re:How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired.

[sehlat]

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.

Re:How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired.

[taharvey]

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.

So were tablets

[peragrin]

Newton message pad? heck even touch styles have been around since the 70's

The base technology is just starting to catch up with the dreamers. Microsoft was promoting tablet edition windows XP in 2002. It took until 2010 until the tech caught up to the promise(and even then it still has a lot of things to improve on.

Quad copters have been built and flown since the 1930's but the tech was always just lacking. it took computers to create fine enough controls to stabilize the flights enough to be practical. In coming Decades we are going to look back at the various flying machines of the 1950's and 1960's and build them with new tech. The base ideas are the same it is the material science, sensor designs, small enough transistors that has drastically improved to make old ideas practical.

Look at the V-22 Osprey. That machine literally couldn't fly in the 1980's they couldn't quite get it to work. It took 15 years of additional refinement to make it practical.

3D printers aren't quite there yet. the material science is still working on it. But it is a good start.

Speaking of Patents ...

[eckenheimer]

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?