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Stone chipping was the birth of tool use, but it was also the birth of
subtractive manufacturing
, a process of object creation wherein a larger block of material (i.e., a big flat stone) is subtracted from until all that remains is a large pile of debris and the desired object (i.e., the sharpened flake). And until recently, subtractive manufacturing was essentially how object creation got done.

Charles Hull changed this game. In the early eighties, Hull decided he wanted to help Detroit's ailing car industry compress their time to market and regain their competitive advantage. As he was then working for a small company in Southern California that specialized in developing applications for ultraviolet radiation, including curing
(hardening) UV coatings and inks, Hull realized that curing's methodology opened the door for an entirely new manufacturing process. Instead of having to create new plastic parts and prototypes through subtractive methods, if he could figure out how to print sheets of UV-hardened plastic atop one another (and attach them to one another), he could build new automotive components via accretion—a method of
additive manufacturing
in which objects are built up one layer at a time. This was the birth of 3-D printing.
⁹

To give you better idea of how this works, think of an ink-jet printer. These ubiquitous office products are 2-D printers that convert digital instructions (from your computer) into an “object” (aka printed text on a page) by printing along a two-dimensional (x and y) axis. A 3-D printer does the same except it adds in a vertical dimension (the z axis)—thus allowing for creation in all three dimensions.

Hull constructed his first 3-D printer in 1984, then founded the Valencia, California–based 3D Systems
¹⁰
to develop and commercialize the technology. Unfortunately, this was not easy. Over the next twenty years, development was slow (deceptive), incredibly expensive, and burdened with complicated user interfaces. All three factors prevented widespread adoption. By the early 2000s, despite their enormous first mover advantage, 3D Systems was on the verge of bankruptcy. “The company was a train wreck,” says Avi Reichental.
¹¹
“They had lost sight of the fact that their technology was accelerating exponentially. They had forgotten how to innovate.”

And Reichental would know, as he was the person brought in to save the company.

On paper, Reichental was an odd choice for the job. Having spent the previous twenty-three years working for the Sealed Air Corporation, the inventors of Bubble Wrap, Reichental didn't know much about additive manufacturing. But what he did understand was innovation. “Sealed Air wasn't your standard package goods company,” says Reichental. “It was more like a Silicon Valley start-up: totally entrepreneurial, always exploring new possibilities, always trying to crack open
new markets.”

As a result, Reichental worked dozens of different jobs during his Sealed Air tenure—eventually becoming the company's fourth-ranking officer and helping grow the firm from a 400-person, $100 million business (when he joined), into an 18,000-person, $5 billion behemoth (when he left). One of his many positions included a stint in the manufacturing department, where he was first introduced to 3-D printing as a way to speed up the prototyping process. This meant, when he first got the call about the 3D Systems job, Reichental had just enough information to do his due diligence. What he discovered was eye-opening.

“Sure,” he says, “3D Systems was on the verge of extinction”—that is, still caught in its deceptive phase—“but I applied Moore's law to all the different verticals that went into this technology and saw they were all about to explode. By following out the exponential curves, I saw a technology that was about to transform how we create, what we create, and where we create. When you create additively, complexity comes free of charge. This means you're not constrained by any of the traditional manufacturing limits. You go straight from a computer file to a finished product, and can make millions of one-of-a-kind items without retooling or restocking. It's localized manufacturing at every scale. What I realized was that 3-D printing is a ubiquitous connection between the virtual and the actual; it's a technology with the potential to touch everything in our lives.”

Reichental took the job. At the time, 3D Systems didn't have much of a product suite. They made six different kinds of printers—their most powerful device powered by two print engines—that could print in only four materials. Worse, 3D Systems didn't manufacture any of those materials, and only certain materials worked with certain machines.

Reichental's first order of business was to expand and integrate. “I wanted more printers, more materials to print with, and I wanted our printers to print with our materials so that you didn't have to be a super-expert to figure out how to work the machines. Simplicity was really important to me. I wanted people to expend their creativity
thinking about new things to design, not about how to work the machines.”

Along these same lines, Reichental also took to pestering Charles Hull. “Chuck still worked for the company. [Hull had retired, but was brought back as an interim CEO before Reichental took the job, and had stayed on in an advisory capacity.] His office was right by the coffee machine. One morning I stopped by and said: ‘Our printers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and you need to be astronaut-smart to run any of them. So, you know, why can't we make cheap push-button desktop versions?' He didn't treat me like a madman, but it was close. The next day I stopped by again and asked the same question. I did this every day for six weeks. Finally, one morning, he beat me to it. He came by my office and brought coffee. He had this incredible glow and said, ‘I think I know how to do it.' ”

And together they did. These days, 3D Systems is a thriving $6 billion
¹²
company making over forty different printers—the largest one capable of printing a Toyota Camry dashboard as a single piece. The simplest one is called the Cube, which costs $1,299 today (with plans to drop the price below $500 in the next couple of years). All told, these machines can print in over a hundred different materials, ranging from nylons, plastics, and rubbers all the way through biological materials (cells), real waxes, and even fully dense metals.

Yet, as was pointed out in the last section, an exponential technology doesn't really become disruptive until a powerful, user-friendly interface exists (think Mosaic). Thus 3D Systems has also expanded into software, with the goal of making their interface easy enough for children to use. They've been successful, too. “If you can point and click a mouse,” says Reichental, “you can now design things for a 3-D printer. I call it the coloring-book model. In the past we had the canvas model. If you wanted to be a great artist, you had to have years of experience applying paint to a blank canvas. Now, with our coloring-book approach, if you want to be supercreative, all you have to know how to do is color between the lines.”

What makes this development so much more important is that 3D
Systems isn't the only company designing new interfaces. Experimentation has begun, drawing in a multitude of other players. As a result, the field sits right about where the web sat when Marc Andreessen introduced Mosaic—completely primed for exponential explosion.

Even now, at the beginning of this explosion, the impact that 3-D printing is having on our world is considerable. Already the printing of standard consumer products—bowls, plates, smartphone cases, bottle openers, jewelry, and purses (made from mesh)—has gone from a hobby to a nascent industry. Dozens of websites now sell goods rendered with 3-D printers, and retailers are starting to get in on the action. As Mark Cotteleer,
¹³
Research Director at Deloitte Consulting, explains: “Our studies demonstrate two critical facts. First, break-even points for some objects, in particular smallish items made of plastic, can already surpass the hundred thousand unit mark—making them viable for many types of consumer products. Second, there is clear evidence that even for individual households, a consumer level additive manufacturing device can quickly manufacture enough goods to pay for itself, and thus represents an attractive financial investment for some US households.”

On a larger scale, 3-D printing is making its presence felt in the transportation industry. Today most cars coming out of America, Europe, and Japan include 3-D printed parts. In September 2014, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers (whom we will meet again later) and his team 3-D printed an entire car on site in one day.

Rogers describes digital manufacturing as the third industrial revolution. “The first revolution was the steam engine. Henry Ford gave us the second revolution, mass production, in which you can make something cheap as long as you make a million of them. The third revolution comes from the democratization of manufacturing, wherein a new car design does not require a new plant to be built.”
¹⁴

This third revolution is also impacting the aerospace industry. SpaceX recently announced it will 3-D print much of the rocket engine used in the Dragon 2 capsule,
¹⁵
Boeing currently 3-D prints over two hundred parts for ten different aircraft platforms,
¹⁶
and my own company, Planetary Resources (more on Planetary later), is 3-D printing much of the spacecraft that will travel to and prospect near-Earth asteroids.

And the financial impact of 3-D printing in the transportation industry cannot be overstated. CFM International's next generation superefficient LEAP airplane engine (expected commercially by 2016) uses 3-D printing to manufacture a radically new kind of fuel nozzle—impossible to manufacture with conventional machining processes—that reduces fuel use by 15 percent, a figure that, across the lifetime of a plane, translates into hundreds of billions of dollars of future savings.
¹⁷

Medical devices are even further along. Because 3-D printing allows products to be perfectly matched to an individual's body shape, 3-D printers are being used today to make individually customized surgical tools, bone implants, prosthetic limbs, and orthodontic devices—all of which significantly enhance patient outcomes. It's also worth pointing out how fast this is happening.

In 2010, in
Abundance
, we reported on the work done by the incredibly talented Scott Summit, an industrial designer by trade, who was using 3-D printers to make customer-designed prosthetic limbs and back braces. Those medical devices were 3-D printed in a one-off fashion. Today, just three years later, Summit has joined 3D Systems, where he is helping take medical manufacturing to scale. Case in point, the company now provides the manufacturing infrastructure for every hearing aid device around the world, and over 95 percent of those are completely 3-D printed.

Another example of large-scale medically related 3-D printing can be found in the fully automated factories of Align Technology, the makers of Invisalign—the clear plastic teeth-straightening alternative to metal braces. This factory 3-D prints 65,000 distinct aligners every
day. “Last year alone,” says Reichental, “they printed seventeen million pairs of fully customized one-offs in a factory of the future not much bigger than a large college lecture hall.”

Of course, the impact made by 3-D printing is going to stretch far further than just consumer goods and transportation and medical devices. Every aspect of the $10 trillion manufacturing sector has the potential to be transformed. That's $10 trillion worth of opportunity. So how can exponential entrepreneurs with little knowledge of this platform use it to disrupt industries and tackle the bold? Well, let's meet a few such innovators and find out.

I first met Aaron Kemmer, Michael Chen, and Jason Dunn, a trio of bold-minded innovators, during the summer of 2010 at the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program. It was a passion for space that brought them together. “That's why we came to SU,” explains Kemmer.
¹⁸
“We were all serial entrepreneurs hunting for a big idea. We wanted to start a company that would help open the space frontier. We were definitely not thinking the way forward was going to be 3-D printing.”

It was SU chair of robotics and three-time shuttle astronaut Dr. Dan Barry who pointed them in that direction. “We knew a little bit about 3-D printing,” says Chen, “but only because Jason, with his aerospace background, had played with it a little in college. But when we were doing analysis—just looking at all the different exponential technologies and trying to come up with our idea—Dan Barry kept wandering over and telling us he had been to the International Space Station (ISS), and wow, having a 3-D printer on the ISS would sure be useful.”

Eventually, they decided to figure out
how
useful.

“It's a supply chain problem,” explains Dunn. “The ISS is at the back end of the longest, most complicated, and most expensive
supply chain in existence. Launch costs are roughly ten thousand dollars a pound. And any object sent into space has to be durable enough to survive the eight minutes of high g-forces it takes to get out of the Earth's gravity well—which means building heavier objects. But any additional weight imposes a double penalty: Not only does every extra pound cost extra money, but it requires extra fuel to get off the planet, which means even more money.”

Plus, when parts aboard the station break, resupply can take months and months. This is why there are over a billion manifest parts (meaning they've been paid for but have not necessarily flown yet) aboard the ISS. And after doing more research, Kemmer, Dunn, and Chen realized that 30 percent of these parts were plastic—meaning they should be printable with already available, off-the-shelf 3-D printing technology.