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Nearly a century ago, the warehouse on Jefferson and 4th Street in Oakland was a brass foundry. Back then, workers melted scrap metals to create the amber alloy that was a 
staple in the manufacturing of products from industrial tools to the trumpets like those that brought Louis Armstrong’s music to life.
In 2011, the cobwebs and mildew that had collected on the wooden rafters of the warehouse were sandblasted to usher in a new era of production.
Today, instead of melting down large cauldrons of metals and manually laboring over molds and presses, tech-savvy workers need only to follow one simple direction before finished products from dolls to prosthetic limbs materialize in 3D: “Just click print.”
These three words have become the motto of Fathom Studio, a 3D printing company that is the brainchild of founders Rich Stump and Michelle Mihevc.
Mihevc and Stump, who met through a friend, invested their own money in a 3D printer 
that was housed in Mihevc’s garage before the pair created Fathom in 2011. Since opening its doors, Fathom has seen a three-year growth of 1,188%, with 2012 revenues at $3.4 million, according to Inc.com. The company is ranked #369 in Inc.’s list of the 5000 fastest growing companies in America in 2013.
Fathom’s 3-word motto, painted on the office walls, sums up the way innovators are looking to overhaul the way we make things.
“You can make parts of just what you need. Print them on demand,” said Stump.
The ingenuity of 3D printing and Fathom’s role in it has attracted high-powered partners like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“We want to see this state of the art technology move forward. Fathom helps with that,” said Patrick Dempsey, spokesperson for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who is 
currently working on a partnership between Fathom and the laboratory.
Instead of cutting or extracting a product from materials like metal or wood, 3D printing builds products layer-by-layer at the touch of a button. The industry lingo for this is “additive manufacturing,” because the product is created by adding only the materials you need.
The most surprising element of this seemingly esoteric invention is that its mechanics are fairly simple. Similar to the way a desktop printer uses inkjet technology to spit layers of ink onto a piece of paper to create a certain color, some 3D printers use a process such as polyjet technology to spit layers of photopolymer, a type of liquid plastic, onto a metal tray to create a certain form.
On top of that metal tray, called a build tray, each thin layer of plastic is distributed by a polyjet head, which is like the inkjet head that darts back and forth in a desktop printer. Then a UV light passes quickly overhead, curing the single layer of liquid plastic.
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