Back when I was yardstick high, a well-dressed couple on TV kept breaking into the show I was watching to enthuse about a new technology that was going to cook a complete steak dinner during the hour-long program. It was an early demonstration of an appliance that would become both more efficient and commonplace: the microwave.

I’m reminded of that incident as I read about technology’s new wunderkind, 3-D printing, variously known as additive manufacturing, fused deposition modeling, selective laser sintering, and multi-jet modeling. Whether a do-it-yourself kit, desktop model, or factory-floor production system, their basic function is the same: to read pretty much any 3-D file—STL, WRL, PLY, or SFX—and convert it into a tangible object made from a variety of materials.

I find this fascinating, a magic-wand-meets-ultimate-engineering moment in human development. And if the word online is any indication, so do many others, the most zealous of whom consider 3-D printers harbingers of a new industrial revolution.

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