But looking ahead, the metal printing technique could also be used to help miniaturise devices.

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Conveyor belts carried long, wafer-thin strips of metal into printing-press-like rollers, which coated them with electrode-active material.

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Phototypesetting could use a photographic image of fonts, rather than hot metal, to create the printing layout.

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As for the crudities of hot-metal typesetting and letter-press printing, all these have long been superseded by electronic setting (in which a 1970s managing director, Ian Trafford, was a pioneer, and made The Economist one too), and by the stunning quality of modern offset printing.

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While industrialised 3D printing has been around for decades, printing in a variety of materials including ceramics, metal and rubber, the desktop versions are far more limited.

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Weinberg points out that even before consumer 3D-printing became fashionable, gun enthusiasts were already making their own metal firearm components with computer controlled milling machines and posting their designs to sites like CNCguns.com.

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