Solidscape: Celebrating a Legacy of Innovation One Layer, One Industry at a Time

by Patricia E. Moody,  The Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal

When Royden Sanders’ professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) concluded that their student’s thesis was “too complicated,” like other later dropouts — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg — Sanders walked. And he went on to create even bigger and more complicated devices and operations, starting with one of his first military creations, the FM radio altimeter, advancing through what we now recognize as the tough but productive path of creativity. Sanders worked with Raytheon’s famous “Team of 11” to produce engineering firsts that took us into the moon race and beyond. And like so many entrepreneurs before him, in 1951, Sanders started what would become his biggest innovation in the Charles River Basin, a fertile crescent that spawned so many textile, automotive, machining and plastics firsts (see Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation). One year later, he moved the enterprise to the top two floors of yet another ancient brick mill, this one a former textile operation along the Nashua River, less than a mile upstream from the mighty Merrimac, the larger waterway that powered the Unites States’ first industrial revolution.  

From Small Brick Mills to Bigger Brick Mills

The company that bore his name, Sanders Associates, continued to expand its portfolios until acquired by Lockheed and finally BAE Systems. A different kind of worker moved into the brick mill, replacing the mill girls and machine tenders of the dying textile and shoe shops. Sanders’ brick mill lay at the very edge of one of Nashua’s larger immigrant neighborhoods, French Hill, bounded on the south by the Nashua River and St. Francis Church, and the north by the city’s older, more gentile homes. 

But even for well-funded and well-established innovation engines like Sanders Associates, getting from design to prototype to full production could take months of work, rework and some missed launch dates. For an industry that worked primarily in metals, casting and mold building and first production, multistep, precision processes sometimes produced unsatisfactory results. What Sanders required even in the earliest design and prototype stages was precision and predictability, the kind of exactness that centuries of metal-working technology could not always deliver.

And so Sanders returned to the lab to come up with yet another solution. Working from digital innovations, including inkjet and desktop printers, Sanders created an answer to lengthy and unpredictable prototype development. By then, well into his 70s at his new startup, Sanders Prototype in Wilton, NH, would speed up the design process by creating a three-dimensional prototype from a computer-aided design, i.e., hardware from software. Sanders Prototype produced the Model Maker Plotter System, a desktop unit that made models of small parts one layer at a time at a CAD workstation. Sanders’ new creation reduced time to market while it offered engineers a new tool to “see” and create small parts earlier in the cycle and on site. The first models sold for $70,000; they were initially used to produce small parts for the jewelry, automotive and aircraft industries. From a CAD system file, the machine deposited overlapping droplets of plastic “wax” material in layers two thousandth of an inch thick, creating an object that could be up to six inches in height, width and depth ready for molding or casting.

Early machines were delivered in up to 60 days. Fast-forward 20 years to 1994, when Sanders Prototype evolved into Solidscape Inc., based in Merrimack, NH.

“Solidscape, a Stratasys company, believes in innovation and offers more models and choices for a bigger range of possibilities — not just design-to-market rapid development, but a way to personalize and customize design,” said Dan McCarthy, vice president of operations. “Customers can expect to receive their machines in weeks, sometimes days, thanks to the New Hampshire company’s workforce and lean sourcing and manufacturing improvements.” 

According to Vice President of Marketing William Dahl, a high-tech veteran, industry applications for additive manufacturing technology are the exciting breakthroughs that have energized Solidscape. The machines have become more affordable, with prices ranging from $25,000 to $46,000; now smaller jewelry and medical equipment businesses, as well as educational institutions, can afford the technology.