Big Sneaker Brands Promised a 3D-Printed Revolution. These Are the Disrupters Making It Happen

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."