Cima-Sachs MIT 3D printing invention (late 1980s)
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Coined the term "3D printing." Adapted dot-matrix printheads to deposit ceramic slurry. First parts were ceramic molds for artificial hips.
About four or five years later, two guys here at MIT coined the term 3D printing — Professor Ely Sachs in mechanical engineering and Michael Cima, a materials engineer. They had initial funding from the Leaders for Manufacturing program. 2D dot-matrix printers were already available. They had the clever idea: instead of using ink, let's make our own ink that's a ceramic slurry, and 3D-print a layer of ceramic at a time. [Tom shows a complex 3D-printed ceramic shape from a web image.]