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In November 1981, a Japanese researcher named Hideo Kodama at the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute saw a patent published for building plastic models from light-hardening resin, one thin layer at a time. Three years later an American engineer filed a similar idea, and that second filing is the one most histories treat as the start of an industry.
Since then the layer-by-layer approach has moved from resin vats into hospital planning rooms, concrete construction sites, jet engines, and the International Space Station. The five facts below follow that path, including the dates and caveats that tend to get dropped.
1. The first 3D printer was built in the early 1980s
Chuck Hull filed his patent for stereolithography on 8 August 1984 and was granted it in 1986. His system built an object by creating one cross-sectional pattern after another. Hull’s company, 3D Systems, went on to release the first commercial machine, the SLA-1, in the late 1980s, and Hull is also credited with the STL file format that many printers still read.
Stereolithography was not the only route. S. Scott Crump developed fused deposition modelling, which squeezes out melted plastic, in 1988, and his company Stratasys sold its first FDM machine in 1992. Those two ideas, curing liquid and extruding filament, still sit behind most of the printers you can buy today.
2. Surgeons use 3D-printed models to plan complex operations
Surgical use began in the mid-1990s with printed anatomical models for planning bone reconstruction. The workflow starts with a scan of the patient, which software turns into a three-dimensional file, which a printer then builds as a hand-sized replica the surgical team can hold, measure, and practice on.
Evidence on whether this helps is encouraging but still limited. One economic analysis pooled seven studies, mostly oral and maxillofacial surgery, and found printed models were associated with operations that ran 62 minutes shorter on average. The authors cautioned that several studies were small and that the dollar savings were modeled rather than measured, and they called for more prospective data.
3. Entire houses have been 3D-printed in under 48 hours
In 2017 the company Apis Cor reported printing the walls of a 38-square-meter house in Stupino, Russia, in about 24 hours of machine time. The concrete mix needed temperatures above roughly 5°C, so the crew worked inside a protective tent during a Russian winter.
The printer only produced the shell. Windows, roof, finishing, and furnishings were still added by people afterward. Apis Cor put the total at about $10,134, or around $275 per square meter, and estimated a simple traditional house at roughly $223 per square meter, so a faster build is not automatically a cheaper one. Those figures come from the company itself.
4. NASA has tested 3D printing food and tools in space
A printer built by the company Made In Space reached the station in September 2014 on a SpaceX cargo flight. In December 2014, engineers sent it the digital file for a ratchet wrench, the first time a tool was made in orbit from a design transmitted from the ground. The wrench is 4.48 inches long and took about four hours and 104 plastic layers.
Food is a different story. In 2013 NASA gave a $125,000 grant to engineer Anjan Contractor at Systems and Materials Research Corporation in Texas to build a prototype food printer, with pizza as the first target and meals made from powder cartridges for long missions. That was funding for a prototype, not a working galley on the station. NASA’s interest is practical: on long missions such as a trip to Mars, resupply from Earth may be impossible, so making a part on demand from a file is far more attractive than packing every spare.
5. Some 3D printers can print with metal, not just plastic
Metal printers spread fine powder in thin layers and melt it with a laser. GE used this to make a fuel nozzle tip for the LEAP jet engine. The old design had more than 20 parts welded and brazed together; the printed version is a single piece that GE says is 25 percent lighter and over five times as durable. According to GE, casting the shape had failed eight times before printing worked.
Metal printing also works at much bigger sizes. In July 2021 Amsterdam unveiled the Stoofbrug, a 12-meter bridge built with robotic arms that deposited more than 4,500 kilograms of stainless steel. It is a reminder that “metal printing” covers several quite different processes, from powder beds to robot-guided deposition.
The 2009 patent expiry that put printers on desks
For years, the key fused deposition patents belonged to one company, and printers cost accordingly. Those patents expired in 2009. Before that, the open-source RepRap project, started by Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath in 2004, had already seen users share plans in 2005 for printers able to make about 70 percent of their own parts. Together, expired patents and freely shared designs helped hobbyist printers spread.
If you’re curious about how other technologies reshaped everyday life, check out our piece on accidental inventions. Printing in orbit is covered more broadly in life on the International Space Station.
If you’re into this kind of trivia, you’ll probably also enjoy facts about artificial intelligence few people know.
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From Stupino’s 38 square meters to a ratchet wrench of 104 layers, the same trick repeats at every scale: build the object up one thin slice at a time and let the file do the planning.