Unlike a machine shop that starts with a large piece of metal and carves away everything but the final piece, 3D printing is an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.
-- Edited by admin on Saturday 7th of April 2012 10:10:13 PM
The first commercial 3D printer was invented by Charles Hull in 1984, based on a technique called stereolithography.
Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.
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