In Virginia, TechShop lets 'makers' tinker, innovate

It's hard to miss the plane that sits triumphantly in the midst of a store in Washington's suburbs. But there are no wings, cockpit or motor attached to its shiny fuselage. And the man tinkering with it is neither a professional technician nor an occasional handyman. Rather, he and others around him are "makers" - enthusiasts from a myriad of backgrounds keen on coming up with new things through collaboration.
Welcome to TechShop - a chain of eight facilities in the United States where creatives, in exchange for a fee, can access professional equipment, software and experts. At first glance, the Arlington branch, located at a mall just several Metro stops from the White House, looks like a small, nearly empty and nondescript store.
But once inside, there's no mistaking this is a space where ideas come to life. Spread across nearly 2,350 square feet (220 square meters), it is stocked full of equipment.
A faint smell of burnt wood wafts through the air, emanating from a laser cutting machine.
With the help of this 3D printer, inventors can create shapes in a whole range of materials, from cardboard to wood and foam.
'MAKERSPACES' SEE BOOM
These types of machines are now standard in so-called makerspaces, participatory shops open to the public that have seen a boom of sorts in recent years.
It is unclear when exactly this do-it-yourself (DIY) maker culture or movement first began, with its push for "learning through doing" and taking novel approaches to the use of both traditional and new technologies.
But humans have been collaborating on making tools and coming up with new methods of using them for millennia.
The latest iteration of the maker movement - which has made its mark on more than 500 open sites throughout the world over the past decade - kicked off with two specific events.
First, there was the opening of the first hackerspace, c-base, in Berlin in 1995.
This meeting place for hackers eventually helped provide real-world applications bridging the gap between fiddling and technological hijacking, by allowing these programmers to weld machinery.
The second spark took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld launched a class in 1998 to teach his students how to use machine tools.