On the night of the TCT Awards at Birmingham Town Hall there were several acceptance speeches with thanks aplenty dished out. However, there was only one man in the TCT Hall of Fame to get a mention from an award winner, Dr Adrian Bowyer.
The thanks was given by Siert Wijnia, Co-Founder and CTO of Ultimaker when collecting the Automotive Application Award, who said that Adrian's work on the RepRap Project was the reason Ultimaker was a company in the first place.
We won't ruin Adrian's acceptance speech, which you can watch above, too much but it's safe to say it was the sincerest and most humble plus the one that tickled the host Robert Llewelyn the most.
Although Scott Crump's invention of FDM technology is the underpins the majority of desktop extrusion-based machinery, it was Adrian Bowyer's work at the University of Bath, which helped to proliferate it.
Dr Bowyer wanted to produce a self-replicating machine, and 3D printing proved to be the most suitable technology to achieve that. Once he had achieved his goal, he gave the plans up to the world and thus the open-source industry we know and love was born.
