Innovation: Who Made That 3-D Printer?

It was the UV lights that gave Hull his insight in the first place. The lamps were used in factories to harden a plastic veneer onto tabletops or rubber tiles. Hull realized that he could use UV light to etch plastic layers into whatever shape he liked and then stack these layers to form a 3-D object.

At first he had to write code to tell his machine how to cut each layer, a painstaking process. “I was limited to fairly simple shapes,” he says. One day, for instance, he brought home a Munchkin-size cup to show his wife. “It looked like that thing you buy in the drugstore to wash out your eyes,” he says. And his first 3-D printer “was so kludged together that it looked post-apocalyptic, like some of the equipment they used in that movie ‘Waterworld.’ ”

But by the mid-1980s, the printer had evolved into a working product, albeit one with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the printer was too heavy to lug to demos, Hull made home movies to show to executives. “The movies were pretty corny,” but even so, he says, “we got a tremendous response.” Particularly in Detroit. “Back then, the U.S. automotive industry had fallen way behind Japan,” Hull says, and the car companies were desperate for a secret weapon. The 3-D printer was just that: Engineers could create their own prototypes for door handles or stick-shift knobs, rather than sending blueprints to a tool-and-dye shop, shaving months off the design process.

Now that the technology is becoming affordable (printers start at $1,299), all kinds of people have caught 3-D fever. A University of California professor is working on printing out an entire house. Another 3-D artist has sculpted a “cyborg hand” that lets his son (who was born without several fingers) pick up a water bottle. More disturbing, a group called Defense Distributed claims to have produced a working gun from open-source plans and then printed it out.

“Anything that can be made will be made by anyone anywhere,” wrote Joris Peels, a 3-D pioneer. “Anyone could 3-D-print a spoon, a land mine or a rose.”

PROJECT SKUNKWORKS

Tim Anderson co-founded Z Corp., which pioneered a fast method of 3-D printing.

How did you end up working on 3-D printers? I was living in a student-run machine shop at M.I.T. It was an anarchist utopia where you could just show up and tinker. I was making a robot named Van Gogo that painted oil paintings. One day I was wandering the halls of M.I.T. picking through junk piles, and I ended up meeting people in the basement of Building 35. They were doing research on 3-D printing, and they needed an electronics guy. I said I was one. They came over to see my painting robot, and then they went their merry way. Then I had the revelation: “Gee, I should follow up on this. Because I could do the same stuff I was doing as an artist, call myself an engineer and get paid.” That’s how I spent three years as a gnome inside a 3-D printer.

How did you first build a working prototype? I wasn’t hung up on appearances. I was Mr. Skunkworks. I went through junk piles to find parts from inkjet printers, and then built with those parts. We used a lot of inkjet nozzles in our machines.

What were some of the earliest things that you scanned and printed at Z Corp.? The printer was popular right away for medical imaging. So we had a lot of skulls around. It’s good for surgeons to be able to see skulls in 3-D and practice breaking them and putting them back together.