Pioneers of Printing: Chuck Hull and the early days of 3D printing

In this edition of Pioneers of Printing, we take a look at the life of Charles ‘Chuck’ Hull, the father of 3D printing. In 1983, Chuck Hull invented stereolithography, also known as 3D printing. In the same year, he created the very first 3D-printed part. His innovation changed printing forever and opened new doors, revolutionising not only our industry but also other sectors such as automotive engineering, aerospace and medical printing.

Chuck Hull was born Charles W. Hull on 12 May 1939 in Clifton, Colorado. After graduating from Central High School in Grand Junction, Colorado, he studied engineering physics at the University of Colorado. In 1961, he received his Bachelor of Science degree and began his career.

Hull says he started out by trying to solve a problem. When he came up with the idea of 3D-printed parts in 1983, he was working for a company that used UV light to cure tabletop coatings. As part of his job, he had to produce prototypes of plastic parts that had to be injection-moulded, a process he described as “a really laborious procedure”. When he saw how much time and effort this work required, he thought about a way not only to speed up the process that took up his working days, but also to simplify it. There had to be a more efficient way to tackle this task:

“I saw designing a plastic part as a major hurdle, because every now and then I had to develop a plastic part from scratch, and that frustrated me. I then sort of put two and two together. If I could print lots of these layers, I could produce a proper plastic part, and that was the fundamental ‘aha moment’.”

On 8 August 1984, Chuck Hull filed his patent “, ‘Apparatus for the production of three-dimensional objects by stereolithography ’”, thereby coining the term ‘stereolithography’. The patent was granted on 11 March 1986 and changed the printing industry forever. It soon became a widely used technique for rapid prototyping and direct manufacturing. In keeping with his work at the time, Hull’s original invention utilised thin, printed layers of ultraviolet-curing materials stacked on top of one another.

After his patent was granted in the United States, he co-founded 3D Systems. Initially, he worked exclusively with solid-state imaging technology. Just one year later, in 1987, his company produced the very first 3D printer: the SLA-1 stereolithography printer (SLA).

His 3D printing technology proved a huge success with car manufacturers, the aerospace industry and companies developing medical devices. Soon, industry giants such as General Motors and Mercedes-Benz were using his systems to build prototypes.

Today, Chuck Hull holds 93 USpatents and 20 European patents, and in 2014 he was honoured by the European Patent Office with the European Inventor Award in the non-European countries category, and in 2015 by the Industrial Research Institute with the IRI Achievement Award for his groundbreaking invention of stereolithography.

By 2010, more than 20 years after Chuck Hull had started with his modest idea, 3D printers had become a relatively inexpensive product that had even found its way into private households – a development that the inventor had foreseen from the very beginning: He told his wife that it would take 25 to 30 years for the technology to find its way into people’s homes.

When you speak to the father of 3D printing, , today, he is amazed at exactly what his own creation has been capable of achieving, and curious to see where the future will lead.

“When you’re innovative and creative, the possibilities are simply endless.”

In an interview with Industry Week, Hull said:

“The first thing I always say is that I’m not much of a futurist. But the advantages certainly lie in the fact that no tools are required, that production can be carried out quickly and on an individual basis, and that many plastic parts are manufactured automatically using 3D printing. This is another step towards digital manufacturing and fits perfectly into the whole movement. In the future, people won’t even give it a second thought. It will be the accepted method for manufacturing plastic parts. The same applies to metal parts, although at the moment these tend to be specialist components. Perhaps they’ll reach the same level. We’re seeing a trend towards more parts being printed for the aerospace and medical sectors.”