Think about this for a moment: You see a need for a gadget or tool that would make your life easier. You sit down at a computer, design the gadget or tool, then have your personal fabricator produce the gizmo from scratch—all in your own home. Sound a bit sci-fi-ish? Actually there are "fab labs" doing just that operating around the world today in places like Ghana and Costa Rica and Boston.

Neil Gershenfeld, the director of MIT’s Center for Bit and Atoms, explains this fantastic-sounding frontier of technology in his latest book Fab. In a nutshell, a personal fabricator (PF) is a "machine that makes machines; it’s like a printer that can print things rather than images." Gershenfeld further notes, "With a PF, instead of shopping for and ordering a product, you could download or develop its description, supplying the fabricator with designs and raw materials." And so you have, for example, people in Ghana creating machines to harness the sun’s energy for solar cooling via vortex tubes made in fab labs.

If you expect Fab to be an inaccessible, jargon-laden, academic tome you would be wrong. Gershenfeld writes with the agility of a high-wire artist and the style of a bestselling novelist. Read, for example, the following excerpt of setting up one of the first fabrication labs in an inner-city Boston community center:

As we developed the fab lab, the plan was to first teach a few interested MIT students how to create the circuit boards, and then have them show the kids at the community center. But when I prepared to show a grad student, Amon Millner, how to do that, 11-year-old Dalia Williams showed up. Dalia thought the idea sounded pretty cool, so she shoved Amon aside and announced that she was going to make the board instead of him.

Dalia appeared to be entirely out of control, parts were flying everywhere. And she wasn’t entirely clear on how it all worked; she and a friend thought the solder they were using was called "salsa." But Dalia stuck with the project, practicing and persisting until she had all of the parts on the board. I was perhaps the only person there who was surprised that it worked the first time we powered it up.

Personal fabricators can produce more than circuit boards and vortex tubes. A group of girls from the community center "set up the fab lab tools on a nearby street corner and held a high-tech craft sale of on-demand creations, making about a hundred dollars in an afternoon." As Gershfeld notes, "This was a life-transforming event for kids growing up in inner-city Boston. Beyond their individual projects, they’re discovering that they can create one of the most valuable things of all: a job."

Fab is fascinating. Prepare to be amazed.

Reviewed by K.J. Wagner