A History of Hands On

First published in January of 2005, Make:Magazine featured DIY projects and the tools that could be used to make them. The biomonthly niche publication and the associated brand eventually became a central part of the Maker movement.

The first Maker Faire, sponsored by the publisher of Make: Magazine, consisted of about 100 exhiibits of DIY projects created by makers. Last year, the flagship Maker Faires in New York City and the Bay Area drew over 200,000 people, in addition to over 100 independently produced mini-faires.

Named for a bar that one of the creators frequented, the first Arduino was prototyped by students at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. The team's decision to open source the project, develop a user friendly programming environment, and offer the boards at a student friendly-price of $30 made Arduino an incredibly popular prototyping tool for amateurs and engineers alike.

The first TechShop, a community space where members pay for access to share tools, was created by former Mythbuster science advisorJim Newton. Newton came up with idea after teaching a machine class at a local high school. Students needed a place to apply the skills they had learned to their own project, and were willing to pay for the privlege. TechShops have since been launched in six different locationa around the country.

DIY sharing hub Instructables started out as a blog associated with the MIT Media Lab, where members documented the details of project to create open source hardware experiment for kitesurfing. The site then became an documentaiton tool for Squid Labs, allowing empoyees to share instructions for cool projects. The site was officially spun off into an independent site in '06, and now lists instructables for over a 100,000 projects.

RepRap, short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper, was the first low-cost 3D printer to be designed and released as an open source project. The original intention was that parts of the machine would be able to be 3D printed themselves by another RepRap, making the machines self-replicating.

Thingiverse began as companion to Makerbot, as an online community for people to share 3D models which could then be downloaded as STL files and 3D printed. In the summer of 2014, Thingiverse celebrated the publication of the site's 400,000th 'thing.'

After meeting through the hacker group that became NYC Resistor, Bre Pettis and Adam Smith decided to start a company around making consumer friendly 3D printers. MakerBot eventually produced some of the first inexpensive commercially available 3D printers. The printers were simple and relatively limited, but they worked right out of the box, and would soon become a staple of makerspaces accross the country.

Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chan came up with the idea for Kickstarter after trying unsuccessfully to bring a band he like to play a show in New Orelans. He envisioned a way that he could reach out to the public to share the costs of funding the concerts. After moving to New York a few years later, Chan met co-founders Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, and together the team created the first iteration of the Kickstarter website. The first projeec to get funded was called 'Drawing for Dollars' and received $35 from three backers. Currently, the record for the most funded project is held by the Pebble Time Smartwatch, with over 20 million dollars raised.

In January of 2011, the MAKE division of O'Reilly recieved a grant from the Department of Advanced Research Projects to fund its Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach Program (MENTORY). The program set a goal of launching makerspaces at 1000 California high schools within the next four years.

The brainchild of Syracuse University grad student Lauren Smedly, the Fab Lab at the Fayetteville Free Library was established as the first makerspace in a public library. The FFL Fab Lab now has seven 3D printers, 3D modeling software, sewing machines, and 3D scanners, all available to the public free of charge.