At some point in human history, if you needed something, you either bought it, made it by hand, or accepted that you simply could not have it. Then the 3D printer arrived and dismantled all three of those options. Now, if you need a specific bracket for a shelf that has not been manufactured since 2009, you simply make it at home, before lunch.

The 3D printing community has taken this freedom and run with it in every possible direction. Some of what they have produced is just plain brilliant, solving real problems with a little bit of lateral thinking. Some of it is completely unnecessary and deeply impressive for exactly that reason. All of it is proof that giving humans access to a machine that turns ideas into objects is one of the better decisions the technology industry has ever made.

I thought it was a crazy idea at first but am amazed how well it is working. He looked online and saw that hives were around $1,000 so he decided to design and build one from scratch designing it in cad software and printing parts using a PRUSIA 3d printer.

3D printing was not invented in someone's garage by an enthusiastic hobbyist. It was invented in 1983 by Chuck Hull , an engineer who was trying to make prototype parts faster without waiting weeks for a manufacturer to produce them. He called the process stereolithography, patented it in 1986, and co-founded 3D Systems Corporation to commercialize it.

For the next two decades, the technology lived almost exclusively in engineering firms and manufacturing plants, producing prototypes that cost thousands of dollars per print. The consumer version that now sits on desks and in spare bedrooms arrived largely because of the RepRap project in 2005, an open-source initiative to build a 3D printer that could print most of its own components. The idea was a machine that could reproduce itself, which is something out of a science fiction novel.

But it is a pretty simple process, actually. A digital file is sliced into thousands of horizontal layers by software, and the printer builds the object from the bottom up, depositing material layer by layer until the finished thing exists in three dimensions.

The most common home printers use a spool of plastic filament, heated and extruded through a nozzle with extraordinary precision. More advanced versions use resin, metal powder, or ceramics. The principle across all of them is the same: take a flat layer, add another flat layer, repeat until you have something solid. It is, at its core, a very patient and very precise stacking exercise.

The medical applications are where 3D printing becomes a literal life-saver. Prosthetic limbs, traditionally expensive and time-consuming to produce, can now be printed for a fraction of the cost and fitted in days rather than months. The e-NABLE community, a global network of volunteers, has printed and donated thousands of prosthetic hands to children around the world, often for under $50 per device.