A 20 Year Old 3D Print - Circa 1995

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Back in the 1990's an MIT professor named Ely Sachs was the first to coin the phrase, '3D printing'. This was all the while researchers and students at MIT were working on some of the earliest 3D printers there were. Utilizing a printer which worked with an alumina powder, and a binding agent, several prints were created in quite the detail for being 1995-1996. Most of these prints were lost, however, one has recently emerge when it was gifted to a M.A. man named Branden Gunn. The full story on this old 3D print of the Hagia Sophia can be found here: http://3dprint.com/12179/old-3d-prints-hagia-sophia

Below is a picture of this amazing 20 year old piece:

[oraltosun]

Back in the 1990's an MIT professor named Ely Sachs was the first to coin the phrase, '3D printing'. This was all the while researchers and students at MIT were working on some of the earliest 3D printers there were. Utilizing a printer which worked with an alumina powder, and a binding agent, several prints were created in quite the detail for being 1995-1996. Most of these prints were lost, however, one has recently emerge when it was gifted to a M.A. man named Branden Gunn. The full story on this old 3D print of the Hagia Sophia can be found here: http://3dprint.com/12179/old-3d-prints-hagia-sophia

Below is a picture of this amazing 20 year old piece:

Have you got the STL file ?

[CaptainObvious]

Have you got the STL file ?

It's probaly written in clay tablets though....

[Eddie]

oraltosun, I believe the article says that the file is probably located on a 20-year-old floppy disc somewhere, but they don't know where.

[Feign]

The ME department at the school I went to has some prints on display from the late 90s, though definitely not as far back as '95. They were printed in gypsum powder and I think only a few are still this well intact. Powder and binder printing gets very fragile as the binder degrades over time, making these 'historical' pieces pretty much doomed to degrade back into powder.

As for the .stl file, from what I understand, .stl was pretty new at the time (if it was even in use yet, I'm not sure), the piece may have been made originally in G-Code with a CNC Tool Path Editor... Though I could be wrong.

[americamakesralph]

Thanks you for the great article. I fondly recall working with Jim Serdy, Ely Sachs, Mike Cima and the rest of the incredible MIT 3D Printing Team of graduate students while I was CTO at Extrude Hone Corp transferring the technology and negotiating one of the "seven" field of use licenses. They are true 3D Printing pioneers that never get mentioned. Jim was the chief lab technician and MacGyver that made everything work - amazing guy. The prototype lab printer shown in one of the pictures was controlled by a Mac and Jim laboriously made each of the continuous jet binder jet nozzles manually (8 to a printhead). While at EHC we continued to perfect the continuous jet technology but eventually went to commercial off-the-shelf drop-on-demand printheads like ZCorp did. We sold Extrude Hone to Kennametal but broke off several technologies including the 3D Printing to form ExOne. ExOne today still uses the binder jet technology developed and licensed from MIT.
As the article mentions, Ely was the first to coin 3D Printing and in fact MIT had a copyright on the phrase until they dropped it in the late 90's.
The incredible Hagia Sophia piece was indeed printed from an STL file. If I recall correctly, I think Jim downloaded the file from the internet. A quick search turned up several sources of a file.

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Ralph, thanks for stopping by and adding a bit to the story. This stuff fascinates me!

[americamakesralph]

My pleasure Brian. It was amazing times with incredible people. We had big dreams and high hopes but didn't realize we were making history.

[3dprintworks]

Fascinating stuff Ralph, thanks for sharing!

[3Dprintermuseum]

This is very interesting. I have a collection of the original Inkjet printer hardware and wanted to put it in a museum. www.layergrownmodel.com to see a video of the printer from early 1990's.
Would you be interested in working together to show these things to the public? It is really great you found this. I was asking if there was a first model off off the original .STL printer we hear so much about from Charles Hull but no one has shown it to me yet. Now we have two of the competitor technologies from that early era.