Behold, the 3-D Fax!
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Machines that turn ideas into objects are reshaping everything from Camrys to computers

NO SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL IS COMPLETE WITHOUT an appearance of the universal thing-maker. Whether it's called a fabricator, a replicator, or a Mark-12 Hyperduplicator, the basic idea is always the same: a gadget that miraculously creates or copies any object the protagonist desires. The fictional thing-maker may be an abused plot device, but a real one, linked to the Internet and nestled between the microwave and the blender, would be the most exciting domestic appliance ever. Need a comb, a Ken doll, an exhaust manifold for a 1967 Ford Fairlane? Download it. Need another cue stick, fondue fork, crystal vase? Copy it.

This fantasy is not as farfetched as it sounds. Three-dimensional printers--known in the industrial world as solid-imaging machines--are already here in nascent form, transforming the way products are designed. Once the first home models arrive, in a decade or so, consumer culture may never be the same. "Your children's children will print their own toys," predicts Mervyn Rudgley; senior director of business development for 3D Systems of Valencia, California, the first and largest company in the field. Charles Hull, founder of 3D Systems, expects the technology will eventually lead to the ultimate in on-line shopping: goods delivered directly into the customer's living room.

Hull cooked up the first solid-imaging system in 1984 in a back-room lab while working for a company in San Gabriel, California, that made ultraviolet lamps. Some of the lamps were used to treat special coatings that harden when exposed to ultraviolet light. By extending the process, Hull realized, he could make solid objects from light-cured plastics. Laboring long nights and weekends, he finally persuaded a computer-guided light beam to dance in a precise pattern on the surface of a basin full of gooey polymer. After the jittering beam solidified a thin layer of plastic, a platform just below the surface dropped a fraction of a millimeter, submerging the layer under another coat of polymer, and the procedure repeated itself. Finally; with the topmost layer hardened, the platform rose dramatically, revealing Hull's first creation: a translucent, bluish, inch-tall cup. It still sits in his office. "It's crude," he says, "but it showed what was possible."