Carlton Reid
Though additive manufacturing wouldn’t exist for another 40 years, the prolific American sci-fi author Murray Leinster penned a 1945 short story featuring a spookily prescient description of what we now know as 3D printing.
As Leinster’s hero, Dirk Braddick, races to face an alien invader, he instructs a robotic arm to form, layer by iterative layer, a workshop spaceship. “The plastic constructor worked tirelessly,” describes Braddick. “It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes. This thing will start at one end of a ship and build it complete to the other end.”
Braddick’s spaceship took more than 24 hours to form, or just a little longer than the time it takes today to spit out a highly complex sneaker from a fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printer. Some of these 3D-printed sneakers look and feel like injection-molded Crocs. But they can also be printed in one piece with a stiff, grippy sole, a stretchy, textile-like, breathable upper, and a midsole with an internal lattice mesh and optimized zones of density, providing tuned bounce and support.
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