No science-fiction spaceship is complete without a replicator: a machine that, when fed with some nameless goo, can produce anything from a nutritious and delicious meal to a high-powered plasmatic continuum flux generator.

The real-world equivalent of the replicator is the three-dimensional (3D) printer, which can mass-produce replicas of everything from molecular structures to rare fossils. Not too long ago, 3D printing was extremely costly and time-consuming, and used a variety of exotic chemicals. These days, as the News Feature on page 22 reveals, it is a little less costly and takes less time, and can use a variety of 'inks', including silicone shower sealant.

It is hard even to guess the effects that 3D printing might have, not just on science, but also on manufacturing, construction, the economy and how we live our lives. Why go to a shop — or even online — to buy a gizmo, when you can print one at home? One can imagine the conflicts about intellectual property, similar to those that have changed the music industry beyond recognition and are now doing the same in publishing.

Still, if two-dimensional (2D) printing is anything to go by, the 3D version will suffer a number of teething problems before it gets to that stage. Engineers, after all, have yet to invent a cheap 2D printer that doesn't cost a fortune in ink cartridges or go wrong every five minutes.

Printing first came to Europe in the fifteenth century, when, as George Sampson said in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1941), “upon the outworks of obstinate medievalism, rang out a series of hammer-strokes that shook the old world to pieces”.

Johannes Gutenberg's first printed Bible appeared in Mainz, Germany, in 1455. “The coming of print is the most important event of the fifteenth century,” said Sampson, because “as the pen is mightier than the sword, so the press is mightier than the pen”. The earliest books in Europe were in Latin. But when William Caxton set up the first press in England, in 1476, he started to print books in English — often his own translations, with scholarly prefaces.

Soon, authors were queuing at Caxton's door to cast their own works into this dramatic medium. “After that I had accomplished and finished divers histories, as well of contemplation as of other historical and worldly acts of great conquerors and princes,” wrote Caxton in the preface to his 1485 edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, “many noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England came and demanded me many and oft times”. These early printed books were, therefore, custom products, and their distribution was wide only relative to the hand-copied editions that had gone before them.

The rest, as they say, is history. Printing was perhaps the greatest driver of literacy there has ever been, and its effect on English was profound. Before printing, English was a collection of mutually almost unintelligible dialects, and those authors who used it wrote as they spoke. That modern readers can understand Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales without too much help is testament not to our cleverness, but to the fact that modern English grew out of the dialect spoken in London, where Chaucer wrote. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by an anonymous contemporary of Chaucer in the north-west of England, would have puzzled Chaucer and is much harder work for us today. But thanks to printing, written English as we now know it had became more-or-less standardized by the seventeenth century.

Caxton's 2D printing set up was probably plagued with technical and mechanical problems, just as ours are. But the effect of printing on society, economics and language has been both profound and spectacular. Printing in three dimensions promises another such revolution, although in an entirely orthogonal direction.