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Catalog of Inventions and Discoveries

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Diagram of a stereolithography 3D printer showing a laser curing successive layers of liquid photopolymer resin into a solid object, with a timeline from Kodama's early 1980s concept to Hull's 1984 patent and 1987 SLA-1 machine.
Invention Materials

The Development of 3D Printing

Three-dimensional printing began with Hideo Kodama's early 1980s description of a layer-by-layer photopolymer system, followed by Chuck Hull's independent 1984 invention of stereolithography, which he patented and commercialized through 3D Systems. These breakthroughs, along with later processes like selective laser sintering and fused deposition modeling, founded modern additive manufacturing.

1981–1984