Chuck Hull

Chuck Hull invented stereolithography, the first practical form of 3D printing, and built the industry that followed. Born in Clifton, Colorado in 1939 and raised in Gateway, a very small town, he took a degree in engineering physics at the University of Colorado in 1961 and spent two decades in industry. In the early 1980s he was working for a company that used ultraviolet light to cure photopolymer coatings onto tabletops. The process was familiar to him: liquid resin hardens where the light strikes it. He also knew, from making prototype parts, that producing a single plastic sample by tooling took weeks and thousands of dollars, which made design iteration painfully slow. The idea he had was to cure the resin in a controlled pattern, one thin layer at a time, and to build a solid object by stacking layers — drawing each cross-section with an ultraviolet laser onto the surface of a vat of liquid, lowering the platform, and repeating. His employer let him use a laboratory in the evenings. He produced the first working part in March 1983, a small eyewash cup, and woke his wife to show her. He filed the patent in 1984 and it was granted in 1986. He also created the STL file format, which slices a three-dimensional model into the layer data a printer needs. It became the industry standard and is still ubiquitous. He co-founded 3D Systems in Valencia, California in 1986 and shipped the first commercial machine, the SLA-1, in 1988. The technology was used first for rapid prototyping and later for hearing aids, dental aligners, surgical guides and aerospace parts. He holds well over a hundred patents.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history