RepRap for Science—How to Use, Design, and Troubleshoot the Self-Replicating 3-D Printer - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 85

tions of the technologies is the fact that open-source 3-D printing is really what has cut the cost
of rapid prototyping so low that it is now accessible to basically everyone. The recent develop-
ment of open-source 3-D printers makes the scaling of mass-distributed additive manufactur-
ing of high-value objects technically feasible for everyone [ 7 - 15 ] . Yet perhaps the first group
to benefit the most financially is practicing experimental scientists [ 16 ] . These self- rep licating
rap id prototypers, or RepRaps were developed by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a professor in mech-
anical engineering at the University of Bath in 2005. Bowyer has a particularly clear view 1 of
what having a general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine means for humanity
and how the project was able to literally evolve under the open-source paradigm [ 17 , 18 ] . This
is why the major variants of the RepRap are all named after biologists Darwin, Mendel, Hux-
ley, and Wallace. The RepRap evolutionary family tree [ 19 ] is shown in Figure 5.1 .