A (Very) Brief History of 3D Printing

In 1981, Hideo Kodama (Japan) invented the first Additive Manufacturing method using photosensitive polymer exposed to masked UV light in successive layers. Then in 1984, Alain Le Méhauté, Olivier de Witte and Jean Claude André from the French General Electric Company patented the stereolithography process three weeks before Chuck Hull (USA) filed for his patent on the same process. GE abandoned the patent because they didn’t see the value in the technology, so Chuck Hull won the race by default.

Hull also brought a couple of important innovations that hadn’t existed before: the STL file format, digital slicing, and infill strategies, all of which we still use today.

In the late 80’s, S. Scott Crump developed Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), which is basically a hot glue gun on a robotic arm that draws shapes in thin layers, one on top of the other. It was Stratasys that took it to market in 1990.

The RepRap Project started in Britain in 2005 as a non-commercial open source research project which got a lot of makers into the technology. When Stratasys’ patent released in 2012, dozens of companies started popping up with their own versions of the machine for the consumer market. This is why you can now buy a high quality 3D printer for less than $1000.