A new book shows how 3D printing will revolutionise the creation and distribution of physical things

For most of the 20th century, manufacturing three-dimensional solid objects usually took two forms. Some processes involved shaping material inside a mold, such as injecting molten plastic into a tooling, or shaping heated metal in a press. Other processes involved selectively removing material from a block or sheet, much like a sculptor chipping away at a marble block to carve a statue. Both of these methods have major disadvantages. Creating moulds is very expensive, and the moulds are quite hard to modify once completed. By comparison, so-called subtractive manufacturing wastes a lot of material and is unable to produce certain shapes.

In the 1980s, though, a new family of technologies began to emerge. Unlike previous methods, they created parts by stacking or depositing relatively flat layers and building them up into a three-dimensional shape. These techniques have come to be known as additive manufacturing, three-dimensional printing, or 3D printing.

The most common types of 3D printers work somewhat like an ink-jet printer. A typical ink-jet passes back and forth over a piece of paper, squirting ink from a cartridge out of a nozzle in the places software directs it to. Instead of ink, 3D printers use a material like plastic and heat it...

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