Page 2: 3D Printed Man

Printers aren’t what they used to be. Twenty-five years ago, they were essential computer accessories. Today, many regard them as relics from our paper-centric past.

The digital transition and concern over paper consumption’s impact on the environment have contributed to a change in use of printers. But printers themselves are changing too.

Printers are not just about paper today. 3D printers can now “print” three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file, which points to dramatic changes in manufacturing and delivery of products. The FDA recently approved a 3D printed prescription pill for commercial use. SPRITAM® could be used by the over 3 million people in the US that suffer from seizures.

And in May of 2013, the world’s first gun made on a 3D printer was announced.

The ability of printers to produce objects, including guns or drugs, has fostered new fears about them. Whereas before, the greatest fear from a printer was that it run out of toner or ink right at deadline, there are growing fears about potential negative consequences.

When Solid Concepts boasted in September of 2014 about producing the first-ever firearm made of 3D-printed metal that successfully fired 50 rounds, many came to fear for their safety and the safety of others.

A spoof article run in response to the Solid Concepts “event” says it all. The article lead with “A Texas manufacturing company’s technological innovation turned tragic on Tuesday when a 3D printer jammed while printing a metal pistol, killing two technicians and injuring an intern.”

Soon we’ll need safety locks and caps not just for guns and drugs, but the 3D printers that can manufacture them.

But all joking aside, printers today walk the line between state-of-the-art and old-fashioned technology. Between the increasing obsolescence of one of their oldest products, printed paper, and the amazing emergence of some of their newer products, such as drugs and guns, printers have become a tenacious and adaptable form of technology.

Tenacious because the genealogy of printers can be continuously traced back from the current day to the birth of Chinese woodblock printing circa 600 c.e., a technology that produced whole pages of print. The earliest known printed text dates back to a Buddhist charm scroll that was produced between 704 and 751 c.e., and the first printed newspaper, appeared in Beijing, China in 748 c.e. Moreover, the earliest complete printed book is often regarded as the Diamond sutra printed in 868 c.e.

But for many, the birth of the printer is better situated with the invention of moveable type, a somewhat later invention. Though the Western world likes to claim this invention, it was again the East where it first appeared. Pi Sheng invented moveable type sometime between 1041 and 1048, and the first books to be printed with moveable type were Chinese, sometime around 1050.

In 1440, four-hundred years later, Johann Gutenberg and Laurens Janszoon Koster, both of Germany, were the first Westerners to print with moveable type. Gutenberg inaugurated the era of movable type in the West by printing the Bible in Mainz in 1454, and the first book in English was printed twenty years later.

We must also remember that printing is not just important for the mass dissemination of literature and information, but also plays a key role in the history of money. For example, the Chinese invented multicolor printing in 1107 mainly to make paper money harder to counterfeit, and in 1806, British engineer Joseph Bramah, invented a numerical printing machine for bank notes. To this day, monetary authorities struggle to design paper money that prohibits replication with conventional printer technology.

Flash forward into the nineteenth-and twentieth-century, and the development of printer technology accelerates. The steam printing press was invented in 1814; the rotary printing press, 1847; teletype, 1850; linotype, 1884; monotype, 1887; and offset printing was invented in 1904. Then, in 1938, Chester Carlson invented a dry printing process called “electrophotography,” or more commonly termed, “Xerox.” Fifteen years later, Remington-Rand developed the first high-speed printer...