Direct Digital Manufacturing - History

History

Part of a series on the
History of printing
  • Woodblock printing (200)
  • Movable type (1040)
  • Printing press (1454)
  • Etching (ca. 1500)
  • Mezzotint (1642)
  • Aquatint (1768)
  • Lithography (1796)
  • Chromolithography (1837)
  • Rotary press (1843)
  • Offset printing (1875)
  • Hectograph (19th century)
  • Hot metal typesetting (1886)
  • Hot stamping typesetting (1886)
  • Mimeograph (1890)
  • Screen printing (1907)
  • Spirit duplicator (1923)
  • Dye-sublimation (1957)
  • Phototypesetting (1960s)
  • Dot matrix printer (1964)
  • Laser printing (1969)
  • Thermal printing (ca. 1972)
  • Inkjet printing (1976)
  • 3D printing (1986)
  • Digital press (1993)

Several different 3D printing processes have been invented since the late 1970s. The printers were originally large, expensive and highly limited in what they could produce.

  • Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) was developed and patented by Dr. Carl Deckard and Dr. Joseph Beaman at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1980s, under sponsorship of DARPA. A similar process was patented without being commercialized by R. F. Housholder in 1979.
  • Stereolithography was patented in 1987 by Chuck Hull.
  • Fused deposition modeling was developed by S. Scott Crump in the late 1980s and was commercialized in 1990 by Stratasys.
  • The term "3D printing" was coined at MIT in 1995 when then graduate students Jim Bredt and Tim Anderson modified an inkjet printer to extrude a binding solution onto a bed of powder, rather than ink onto paper. The ensuing patent led to the creation of modern 3D printing companies Z Corporation (founded by Bredt and Anderson, and now owned by 3D Systems) and ExOne.

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