Atoms are the new bits - the new industrial revolution

  • 01 Feb 2010

















Here's the history of two decadesin one sentence: if the past ten years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the web, then the next ten years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next ten years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratise, when they're ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments and other institutions and handed over to regular people. The internet democratised publishing, broadcasting and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital -- the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing -- the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door and, once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. "Three guys with laptops" used to describe a web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too. "Hardware is becoming much more like software," as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That's not just because there's so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials, whether it's the code that drives the off-the-shelf chips in gadgets or the 3D design files that drive manufacturing. It's also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, web-based collaboration and internet distribution.

We've seen this picture before: it's what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces.

First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, web-centric and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher).

The result has allowed online innovation to extend to the real world. As Cory Doctorowputs it in his new book, Makers, "The days of companies with names like 'General Electric' and


A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires (the second-ever UK faire happens in Newcastle on March 14 and 15) and local "hackerspaces". Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content -- all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.

In short, atoms are the new bits.

It all starts with the tools. In aconverted brewery in Brooklyn, Bre Pettis and his team of hardware engineers are making the first sub-$1,000 3D printer, the open-source MakerBot. Rather than squirting out ink, this printer builds up objects by squeezing out a 0.33mm-thick thread of molten ABS plastic. Five years ago, you couldn't get anything like this for less than $125,000.

When I visit in late November, 100 boxes containing the ninth batch of MakerBots are lined up and ready to go out the door (as a customer, I'm thrilled to know that one of them is coming to me).

Nearly 500 of these 3D printers have been sold, and with every one the community comes up with new uses and new tools to make them even better. For example, a prototype head delivers a resolution of 0.2 mm. Another head can hold a rotating cutter, turning the printer into a CNC router (CNC is short for computer numerical control, which simply means that the machines are driven by software). And yet another can print with icing, for desserts.

Out of the box, the MakerBot produces plastic parts from digital files. Want a certain gear right now? Download a design and print it out yourself. Want to modify an object you already have? Scan it (a researcher at the University of Cambridge has developed a technology that will allow you to create a 3D file by rotating the object in front of your webcam), tweak the bits you want to change with the free SketchUp software from Google, and load it into the ReplicatorG app. Within minutes, you have a whole new physical object: a rip, mix and burn of atoms.

Other tools offer additional tricks. The $18,000 ShopBot PRSalpha can work door sized pieces of wood. Or buy a smaller kit for $1,500 at

If metal is your material, try a CNC mill for around $2,000. Or, if you're more into electronics, use the free CadSoft Eagle software to create your own circuit boards, then upload the file to have it fabbed in a few days at places like Advanced Circuits.

So, too, for CNC laser cutters, plasma cutters, water-jet cutters, and lathes. You can make anything from fine jewellery to car chassis this way, and tens of thousands of people are doing just that. We've already seen this DIY creation movement boom around such simple platforms as T-shirts and coffee mugs, then expand into handcrafting at Etsy (which did about $200 million in sales last year). Now it's moving to more complex platforms -- such as 3D models and plastic fabrication -- and open-source electronics hardware such as the pioneering Arduino project.

With the tools in place, the second part of this new industrial age is how manufacturing has been opened up to individuals, letting them scale prototypes into full production runs. Over the past few years, Chinese manufacturers have evolved to handle small orders more efficiently. One-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only big companies could before.

Two trends are driving this. First, there's the maturation and increasing web-centrism of business practices in China. Now that the web generation is entering management, Chinese factories increasingly take orders online, communicate with customers by email and accept payment by credit card or PayPal, a consumer- friendly alternative to traditional bank transfers, letters of credit and purchase orders. Plus, the current economic crisis has driven companies to seek higher margin custom orders to mitigate the deflationary spiral of commodity goods.

For a lens into the new world of open access factories in China, check out, the largest aggregator of the country's manufacturers, products and capabilities. Just search on the site (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you're looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba's IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: we can't make that; we can make that and here's how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here's what it costs.

Alibaba's chair, Jack Ma, calls this "CtoB" -- consumer to business. It's a new avenue of trade and one ideally suited for the micro-entrepreneur of the DIY movement. "If we can encourage companies to do more small, cross-border transactions, the profits can be higher because they are unique, non-commodity goods," Ma says. Since its founding in 1999, Alibaba has become a $12 billion company with 45 million registered users worldwide. Its $1.7 billion initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007 was the biggest tech debut since Google. Over the past three years, Ma says, more than 1.1 million jobs have been created in China by companies doing ecommerce across Alibaba's platforms.

This trend is playing out in many countries, but it's happening fastest in China. One reason is the same cultural dynamism that led to the rise of shanzhai industries. The term shanzhai, which derives from the Chinese word for bandit, usually refers to the thriving business of making knock-offs of electronic products, or as more generously puts it, "a vendor who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices, often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models". But those same vendors are increasingly driving the manufacturing side of the maker revolution by being fast and flexible enough to work with micro-entrepreneurs.

The rise of shanzhai business practices "suggests a new approach to economic recovery as well, one based on small companies well-networked with each other," observes Tom Igoe, a core developer of the open-source Arduino computing platform. "What happens when that approach hits the manufacturing world? We're about to find out."

Not long ago, all this was impossible. To see how it used to be back in the 20th century, watch the movie Flash of Genius.

The film, which is based on a true story, starts in the mid-60s and tells the sad tale of the invention of the intermittent windscreen wiper. A lone inventor -- college professor Bob Kearns -- tinkers in his basement until he finally creates a working prototype.

Rather than sell the technology to a big car company, Kearns decides he wants to build his own company and make the wiper himself. Ford signs on to install Kearns's wipers in one of its new models. That means he needs to build a factory. He leases a huge warehouse and starts outfitting it with heavy equipment.

As Kearns is getting close to firing up his facility, Ford abruptly backs out of the deal. With no revenue in sight, the factory shuts down before producing a single wiper. Eighteen months later, Kearns is walking home in the rain and sees a brand new Ford Mustang turn the corner. The windscreen wiper sweeps, then pauses, then sweeps again. His brilliant idea has been stolen. Kearns is ruined and will soon go mad, thus the rest of the movie. (The real life Kearns sued Ford and Chrysler for patent infringement and, after years of litigation, won nearly $30 million.)

Today, Kearns would do it differently. As before, he would make the first prototype in his basement. But rather than building a factory, he would have had the electronics fabbed by one company and the enclosure made by another. He then would have paid a wiper manufacturer in China to create a custom assembly with these components. They would ship straight to his customers, the car companies, and the whole process would have happened in months, not years -- too fast for big companies to beat him.

To see this model emerging in the real world, you need only visit TechShop, a chain of DIY workspaces that offer access to state-of-the-art prototyping tools for around $100 a month.

On a recent afternoon at the facility in Menlo Park, California, Michael Pinneo, a successful former executive in the synthetic diamond business, is machining a vapour deposition chamber for his newest approach to creating colourless diamonds. Over in the corner stands the base of a rocket lander developed by a team competing in the Google Lunar X Prize. At another table, Stephan Weiss, vice president of Interoptix, and a colleague are assembling circuit boards to manage electricity grids. They're doing 50-unit runs, which Weiss describes as "too small for a factory but too big for your garage". The devices carry the badge of ABB, a giant engineering firm; the utility customers may never know these were made by hand in a hackerspace.

This is an incubator for the atoms age. When TechShop founder Jim Newton went looking for an executive to run it, he quickly decided on Mark Hatch, a former Kinko's executive. The analogy is apt: in the same way that Kinko's democratised printing and, in the process, created an international chain of service bureaus, TechShop wants to democratise manufacturing.

Today, Marx's tools of production are getting so cheap they are once again within the reach of many individuals. State-of-the-art milling machines that once cost $150,000 are now close to $4,000, thanks to Chinese copies. Everybody's garage is a potential high-tech factory. Marx would be pleased.

For a final example, swing to the Seattle suburbs to meet Will Chapman of Brick-Arms. Out of a small industrial space, BrickArms fills gaps in the Lego product line, going where the Danish toy giant fears to tread: hardcore weaponry, from Legoscale AK- 47s to frag grenades that look like they came straight out of Halo 3. The parts are more complex than the average Lego component, but they're manufactured to an equal quality and sold online.

Lego operates on an industrial scale, with a team of designers working in a highly secure campus in Billund, Denmark. Engineers have prototypes fabricated in dedicated machine shops. Then they're manufactured in large-injection moulding plants. Parts are created for kits, and those kits have to be play-tested, priced for mass retail, and shipped and inventoried months in advance of sale.

Chapman works at a different scale. He designs parts using SolidWorks 3D software, which can create a reverse image that's used to produce a mould. He sends the file to his desktop CNC router, a Taig 2018 mill that costs less than $1,000, which grinds the mould halves out of aircraft-grade aluminum blocks. Then he puts them in his hand-pressed injection-moulding machine, melts some resin beads and pumps them through. A few minutes later, he's got a prototype to show to fans. If they like it, he gets a local tool maker to reproduce the mould out of steel and a US-based injection-moulding company to make batches of a few thousand.

Why not have the parts made in China? He could, he says, but the result would be "moulds that take much longer to produce, with slow communication times and plastic that is subpar" (read: cheap). Furthermore, he says, "if your moulds are in China, who knows what happens to them when you're not using them? They could be run in secret to produce parts sold in secondary markets that you would not even know existed."

Chapman's three sons package the parts, which he sells direct.

Today, BrickArms also has resellers in the UK (at, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Germany. The business grew so big that in 2008 he left his 17-year career as a software engineer; he now comfortably supports his family of five solely on Lego weapon sales. "I bring in more revenue on a slow BrickArms day than I ever did working as a software engineer."


What could you do with them? For starters, I realised, you could turn a radio-controlled model airplane into an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone. It turned out that there were plenty of commercial autopilot units you could buy, all based on this principle, but the more I looked into them, the worse they appeared. They were expensive ($800 to $5,000), hard to use, and proprietary. It was clear that this was a market desperate for competition and democratisation -- all the components were becoming dirt cheap. The hardware for a good autopilot shouldn't cost more than $300, even including a healthy profit. Everything else was intellectual property, and it seemed the time had come to open that up, trading high margins for open innovation.

To pursue this project, I started DIY Drones, a community site, and found and began working with some kindred spirits, led by Jordi Muñoz, then a 21-year-old high school graduate from Mexico living in Riverside, California. Muñoz was self-taught -- with world-class skills in embedded electronics and aeronautics. Muñoz turned me on to Arduino, and together we designed an autonomous blimp controller and then an aircraft autopilot board.

We designed the boards the way all electronics tinkerers do, with parts bought from online shops, wired together on prototyping breadboards. Once it worked on the breadboard, we laid out the schematic diagrams with CadSoft Eagle and started designing it as a custom printed circuit board (PCB). Each time we had a design that looked good onscreen, we'd upload it to a commercial PCB fab, and a couple of weeks later samples would arrive at our door. We'd solder on the components, try them out, and then fix our errors and otherwise make improvements for the next version.

Eventually, we had a design we were happy with. How to commercialise it? We could do it ourselves, getting our PCB fab house to solder on the components, too, but we thought it might be better to partner with a retailer. The one that seemed culturally matched was SparkFun, which designs, makes and sells electronics for the growing open-source-hardware community.

The SparkFun operation is in two-storey building in an office park outside Boulder, Colorado. The first floor is larger than three basketball courts, with racks of circuit boards waiting to be sold, packed, and shipped on one side and some machines attended by a few technicians on the other. The first two machines are pick-and-place robots, which are available used for less than $5,000. They position tiny electronic components on a PCB.

Technicians place the boards on a conveyor belt that goes into another machine, which is basically just a heater. Called a reflow oven, it cements the parts into place.

The PCBs arrive from SparkFun's partner firm in China. At volume, they cost a few cents each. That's it. With these elements you can make the basics of everything from a cellphone to a robot (structural elements, such as the case, can be made in low volume with a CNC machine or injection-moulded if you need to do it cheaper at higher volume). SparkFun makes, stocks and sells our autopilot and a few other products that we designed; we get to spend our time working on R&D and bear no inventory risk. Some products we wanted to make were too time-intensive for SparkFun, so we made them ourselves. Now, in a rented Los Angeles garage, we have our own mini SparkFun. Rather than a pick-and-place robot, we have a kid with sharp eyes and a steady hand, and for a reflow oven we use what is basically a modified toaster oven. We can do scores of boards per day this way; when demand outstrips production, we'll upgrade to a small pick-and-place robot.

Every day our website takes orders and prints out the shipping labels. The retail day ends at 3:30 pm with a run to the post office and UPS to send everything off. In our first year, we'll do about $250,000 in revenue, with demand rising fast and a lot of products in the pipeline. With luck, we'll be a million-dollar business by the third year, which would put us solidly in the ranks of millions of similarly successful US companies. We are just a tiny gear in the economic engine driving the US -- on the face of it, this doesn't seem like a world changing economic model.

But the difference between this kind of small business and the dry cleaners and corner shops that make up the majority of micro-enterprise in the country is that we're global and high tech.

Two thirds of our sales come from outside the US, and our products compete at the low end with defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Although we don't employ many people or make much money, our basic model is to lower the cost of technology by a factor of ten (mostly by not charging for intellectual property). The effect is felt primarily by consumers; when you take an order of magnitude out of pricing in any market, you can radically reshape it, bringing in more and different customers. Lowering costs is a way to democratise technology, too.

Itmay be shrinking, but the USmanufacturing economy is still the world's largest. But China's growing production sector is predicted to take the top spot in 2015, according to IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm. Not all US manufacturing is shrinking, however -- just the large part. A Pease Group survey of small manufacturers (less than $25 million in sales) shows that most expect to grow this year, many by double digits. Indeed, analysts expect almost all new manufacturing jobs in the US will come from small companies like ours.

How big can these small enterprises get? Most of the companies I've described sell thousands of units -- 10,000 is considered a breakout success. But one that has graduated to the big leagues is Aliph, which makes the Jawbone noise-cancelling wireless headsets.


But it has no factories. It outsources all of its production. And though more than 1,000 people help to create Jawbone headsets, Aliph has just over 80 employees. Everyone else works for its production partners. It's the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony.

Welcome to the next industrial revolution.

How to build your dream

Every garage is a potential micro-factory and every citizen a micro-entrepreneur in the age of democratised industry. Here's how to transform a great idea into a great product.

Invent - Stop whining about the dearth of cool products - dream up your own. Pro tip: Check patent office websites to ensure no one else had the idea first.

Design - Use free tools like Blender or Google's SketchUp to create a 3D digital model. Or download someone else's design and incorporate your groundbreaking tweaks.

Prototype - Crank out a prototype; desktop 3D printers such as MakerBot are available for under £650. Just upload a file and watch it render your vision in layered ABS plastic.

Manufacture - The garage is fine for limited production, but if you want to go big, go global - outsource.

Factories in China are standing by; sites such as can help you find the right partner.

Sell - Market your product directly to customers via an online store such as SparkFun - or set up your own ecommerce outfit through a firmlike Yahoo orWeb Studio. Then become the poster child for the DIY industrial revolution.
