Science fiction described 3D printing decades before a Japanese researcher built one
In a 1945 short story, Murray Leinster imagined a machine arm that traced drawings in the air while plastic flowed out and hardened. Thirty-five years later, a Nagoya researcher named Hideo Kodama invented real methods for building plastic models layer by layer, on a budget of 60,000 yen a year. Nobody paid attention.
3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, builds a solid object from a digital model by depositing, joining or hardening material under computer control, usually one layer at a time. Its great advantage is making shapes that would be impractical by hand, such as hollow parts or internal lattices. In the 1980s it was good only for prototypes, hence the older label rapid prototyping, but by 2019 precision and materials had improved enough for some processes to serve as genuine industrial production.
Vocabulary tells part of the story. Additive manufacturing caught on in the 2000s, and machining acquired a matching retronym, subtractive manufacturing. For years, 3D printing suggested cheap plastic hobby machines while additive manufacturing sounded like metal and factory parts. Standards bodies still draw a line: additive manufacturing means building parts layer by layer from 3D data, while 3D printing specifically means laying material down through a print head or nozzle.
Fiction kept anticipating the technology. Raymond F. Jones described a molecular spray in a 1950 story, and in 1974 the science writer David E. H. Jones outlined the concept in his Ariadne column in New Scientist. On 27 July 1971, Johannes Gottwald received a US patent for a Liquid Metal Recorder that sprayed metal to form reusable shapes, apparently the first patent describing 3D printing. Kodama's April 1980 inventions used ultraviolet light to harden polymer, but his boss showed no interest.
The 1980s then brought a rush of filings. Raytheon won a 1982 patent for building articles from thousands of layers of powdered metal fused by laser. On 2 July 1984, the American entrepreneur Bill Masters filed what the US patent office records as the first 3D printing patent. Two weeks later three French inventors filed for stereolithography, but their corporate backers abandoned the application, citing a lack of business prospects.
Source: 3D printing
