3D printer essay

Special report: Manufacturing and innovation

A third industrial revolution As manufacturing goes digital, it will change out of all recognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the business of making things will return to rich countries

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt

Messe, home of innumerable German trade

fairs, stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21-

metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and

lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a

hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who

built it, says it is a celebration of the worker

using his mind and hands to create the world

we live in. That is a familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable

ways that will transform the future of manufacturing.

One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows machines for

making prototypes of products, the tools needed to put those things into production and all

manner of other manufacturing kit. Old-school engineers worked with lathes, drills,

stamping presses and moulding machines. These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oily

machinery tended by men in overalls. Hall after hall is full of squeaky-clean American, Asian

and European machine tools, all highly automated. Most of their operators, men and women,

sit in front of computer screens. Nowhere will you find a hammer.

And at the most recent EuroMold fair, last November, another group of machines was on

display: three-dimensional (3D) printers. Instead of bashing, bending and cutting material

the way it always has been, 3D printers build things by depositing material, layer by layer.

That is why the process is more properly described as additive manufacturing. An American

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firm, 3D Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print a hammer for your correspondent,

complete with a natty wood-effect handle and a metallised head.

This is what manufacturing will be like in the future. Ask a factory today to make you a single

hammer to your own design and you will be presented with a bill for thousands of dollars.

The makers would have to produce a mould, cast the head, machine it to a suitable finish,

turn a wooden handle and then assemble the parts. To do that for one hammer would be

prohibitively expensive. If you are producing thousands of hammers, each one of them will

be much cheaper, thanks to economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though, economies of scale

matter much less. Its software can be endlessly tweaked and it can make just about anything.

The cost of setting up the machine is the same whether it makes one thing or as many things

as can fit inside the machine; like a two-dimensional office printer that pushes out one letter

or many different ones until the ink cartridge and paper need replacing, it will keep going, at

about the same cost for each item.

Additive manufacturing is not yet good enough to make a car or an iPhone, but it is already

being used to make specialist parts for cars and customised covers for iPhones. Although it is

still a relatively young technology, most people probably already own something that was

made with the help of a 3D printer. It might be a pair of shoes, printed in solid form as a

design prototype before being produced in bulk. It could be a hearing aid, individually

tailored to the shape of the user's ear. Or it could be a piece of jewellery, cast from a mould

made by a 3D printer or produced directly using a growing number of printable materials.

But additive manufacturing is only one of a number of breakthroughs leading to the factory

of the future, and conventional production equipment is becoming smarter and more

flexible, too. Volkswagen has a new production strategy called Modularer Querbaukasten, or MQB. By standardising the parameters of certain components, such as the mounting points

of engines, the German carmaker hopes to be able to produce all its models on the same

production line. The process is being introduced this year, but will gather pace as new

models are launched over the next decade. Eventually it should allow its factories in America,

Europe and China to produce locally whatever vehicle each market requires.

They don't make them like that any more

Factories are becoming vastly more efficient, thanks to automated milling machines that can

swap their own tools, cut in multiple directions and “feel” if something is going wrong,

together with robots equipped with vision and other sensing systems. Nissan's British factory

in Sunderland, opened in 1986, is now one of the most productive in Europe. In 1999 it built

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271,157 cars with 4,594 people. Last year it made 480,485 vehicles—more than any other car

factory in Britain, ever—with just 5,462 people.

“You can't make some of this modern stuff using old manual tools,” says Colin Smith,

director of engineering and technology for Rolls-Royce, a British company that makes jet

engines and other power systems. “The days of huge factories full of lots of people are not

there any more.”

As the number of people directly employed in making things declines, the cost of labour as a

proportion of the total cost of production will diminish too. This will encourage makers to

move some of the work back to rich countries, not least because new manufacturing

techniques make it cheaper and faster to respond to changing local tastes.

The materials being used to make things are changing as well. Carbon-fibre composites, for

instance, are replacing steel and aluminium in products ranging from mountain bikes to

airliners. And sometimes it will not be machines doing the making, but micro-organisms that

have been genetically engineered for the task.

Everything in the factories of the future will be

run by smarter software. Digitisation in

manufacturing will have a disruptive effect

every bit as big as in other industries that have

gone digital, such as office equipment,

telecoms, photography, music, publishing and

films. And the effects will not be confined to

large manufacturers; indeed, they will need to

watch out because much of what is coming will empower small and medium-sized firms and

individual entrepreneurs. Launching novel products will become easier and cheaper.

Communities offering 3D printing and other production services that are a bit like Facebook

are already forming online—a new phenomenon which might be called social manufacturing.

The consequences of all these changes, this report will argue, amount to a third industrial

revolution. The first began in Britain in the late 18th century with the mechanisation of the

textile industry. In the following decades the use of machines to make things, instead of

crafting them by hand, spread around the world. The second industrial revolution began in

America in the early 20th century with the assembly line, which ushered in the era of mass

production.

As manufacturing goes digital, a third great change is now gathering pace. It will allow things

to be made economically in much smaller numbers, more flexibly and with a much lower

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input of labour, thanks to new materials, completely new processes such as 3D printing,

easy-to-use robots and new collaborative manufacturing services available online. The wheel

is almost coming full circle, turning away from mass manufacturing and towards much more

individualised production. And that in turn could bring some of the jobs back to rich

countries that long ago lost them to the emerging world.

From the print edition: Special report

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