Chuck Hull

Chuck Hull is an American engineer who invented stereolithography, the first working additive-manufacturing technology and the origin of the modern 3D printing industry. While developing UV-curable coatings for furniture and tabletops in 1983, Hull found he could build a solid three-dimensional object by curing a photopolymer resin layer by layer with a focused ultraviolet light, tracing each cross-section from a computer model before dropping the platform and curing the next layer on top; his first printed part was a small eye-wash cup. He filed his stereolithography patent application in August 1984, coining the term stereolithography, and US Patent 4,575,330, Apparatus for Production of Three-Dimensional Objects by Stereolithography, was granted March 11, 1986. In 1986 Hull co-founded 3D Systems to commercialize the technology, and the company shipped the SLA-1, the first commercial 3D printer, the following year; Hull also originated the STL file format still used across the 3D printing industry to describe a model's surface geometry. He continued at 3D Systems as chief technology officer, holds roughly 85 US patents, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014 for founding the additive-manufacturing field.