A Short History of 3D Printing: From 1984 to Your Bookshelf

The technology that prints a lit Hobbit hole for your bookshelf was invented to make factory prototypes faster, and for its first twenty years almost nobody outside engineering had seen it. Here is how it went from a patent office in 1984 to a small studio in Almaty, told through the objects and dates that mattered.

The 1980s: three inventions in one decade

3D printing was invented three times, in three different ways, within about five years.

• 1981. Hideo Kodama in Nagoya published the first description of a machine that hardened liquid photopolymer layer by layer with light. He never completed the patent, and the idea waited.
• 1984. Chuck Hull, working for a company that used UV lamps to cure tabletop coatings, filed a patent for stereolithography (SLA): a laser tracing each layer of a part in a vat of liquid resin. The patent was granted in 1986, he founded 3D Systems, and the SLA-1, the first commercial 3D printer, shipped in 1987. Hull also created the STL file format, which is still the file you send to a studio today.
• 1986. Carl Deckard, a student at the University of Texas, filed the patent for selective laser sintering (SLS), fusing powdered material with a laser. This is the ancestor of today's industrial nylon and metal printers.
• 1988 to 1989. Scott Crump, trying to make a toy frog for his daughter with a glue gun, worked out fused deposition modelling (FDM): melting a plastic filament and drawing the part layer by layer. He and his wife founded Stratasys in 1989. Every desktop filament printer descends from it.

The two processes a studio uses every day, resin and FDM, were therefore both born in the 1980s. What changed since is not the idea but the price. FDM vs resin printing explains how the two still divide the work between them.

The 1990s and 2000s: expensive, industrial, invisible

For two decades 3D printing was called rapid prototyping and lived in the design departments of car makers, aerospace firms and medical companies. Machines cost as much as a house. Milestones from this period:

• 1999. Researchers at Wake Forest printed a scaffold for a lab-grown human bladder, later implanted in patients, an early step for bioprinting.
• 2004 to 2005. Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath started RepRap, an open-source project to build a printer that could print most of its own parts. Its first machine, Darwin, appeared in 2008.
• 2009. A key FDM patent expired. Within months, small companies such as MakerBot were selling desktop kits, and Thingiverse, a free library of printable models, had launched. This is the moment 3D printing left the factory.

The 2010s: the desktop decade

Year	Object or event	Why it mattered
2011	Urbee, the first car with a 3D printed body; a printed unmanned aircraft flown by the University of Southampton	Proved printed parts could be structural
2013	3D printing mentioned in a US State of the Union address	Public awareness peaked, and prices kept falling
2014	First object printed aboard the International Space Station; a ratchet wrench was emailed to orbit and printed	Manufacturing without a supply chain
2015	Spritam became the first 3D printed medicine approved by the US FDA	Printing reached the pharmacy
2016	GE's LEAP jet engine entered service with a printed fuel nozzle, one part replacing about twenty	Metal printing in mass production
2018	Bugatti's printed titanium brake caliper; ICON printed a permitted house in Texas	Cars and buildings
2018 onward	Sub-300-dollar desktop printers reached hobbyists worldwide	The hardware became a household object

At the same time, resin printers dropped from tens of thousands of dollars to the price of a phone, once LCD screens replaced lasers as the light source. Suddenly a 32 mm miniature with individual fingers could be printed at home or in a small studio.

The 2020s: fast, multicolour, and full of book nooks

The most recent leap is speed and colour. Around 2022 a new generation of desktop printers arrived that print three to five times faster than their predecessors and swap between several filaments in one job, which is how a book nook facade gets stone-grey walls and warm wooden doors without any painting. Multi-colour printing explained covers how the filament changes work.

In the same years the culture changed as much as the hardware. Book nooks, which barely existed before 2019, became one of the most printed decorative objects on the planet; what a book nook is tells that story. Articulated dragons, lithophane lamps and desk organisers followed. In 2023 a rocket that was roughly 85 percent 3D printed by mass reached space, and in the same month someone somewhere printed a sad cat for their desk. Both are 3D printing.

Why this history matters for your order

Every stage left something you use when you order from Fantasy Lab 3D. Hull's STL file is still the format you send. Crump's FDM is what prints your vase. Deckard's powder-bed idea is why metal parts exist, even if a studio outsources them. RepRap's open-source culture is why models are shared freely and why a small studio can afford professional machines. And the last five years of speed and colour are why a printed object today costs a fraction of what it did and looks far better. For what is coming next, see 3D printing trends in 2026.

Ready to order?

Forty years of engineering are waiting to make one object for you. Tell Fantasy Lab 3D what it is through the contact section or DM us on Instagram @fantasylab3d.almaty, and we will quote it, print it and put your own small piece of this history on your shelf.