1 3-D wonders It’s Saturday afternoon and you can’t wait to do your weekend homework Your assignment is to make a model of your favorite animal First you use your computer to design a shark Then you hit print You watch as your 3-D printer creates a shark layer by layer out of plastic When the printer stops you examine the shark Its fins tail and even teeth are molded into a model that looks just like the real animal This is the power of 3-D printing 3-D stands for three-dimensional 3-D objects have height width and depth Traditional computer printing is 2-D or two-dimensional 2-D printing creates images with height and width but no depth In place of ink and paper 3-D printers use materials such as plastic or metal Instead of images on paper they create objects This includes tools car parts and even toys 3-D printing is also known as additive manufacturing This is because the printed item is made from scratch Its layers are built up to create a final object 3-D printing creates less waste
3-D printers are becoming more and more common in schools They are used in many subjects such as chemistry art history and biology than traditional manufacturing It also allows people to create customized parts and objects from many kinds of materials A future in which you print your own toys clothes and even food is closer than you think
2 EARLY PRINTING Prior to computers people printed images and documents using printing presses invented in the 1400s In the 1800s typewriters were invented From there printing technology did not change or improve much for more than 100 years Then in the 1940s the first computers were developed Early computers were large and used mainly to complete calculations Their printers did not print words or pictures Instead they punched holes to create patterns in paper cards A decoder machine interpreted the pattern It printed out the words or numbers the pattern represented As developers worked into the 1950s printing technology improved The first high-speed character printers came out in 1954 These could print letters and numbers Around the same time the first image printers were developed But the process for image printing with these devices was slow It did not allow for high-quality graphics
Printing punch cards was a very slow process An improved method of graphics printing came in 1959 with the development of the first plotters Plotters worked by moving black pens over paper to draw lines or shapes Later plotters became the first printers to offer colored ink
