Inkjet Printer

Hello there. My name is Inkjet Printer, and I am a special kind of storyteller. I don't use my voice, though. I use tiny, colorful dots of ink. Have you ever created a beautiful picture on a computer screen and wished you could hold it in your hands or hang it on your wall. That’s my job. I listen to the computer, and then I carefully spray colorful ink to bring your creations to life on paper. Before I was invented, sharing colorful ideas wasn't so easy. It was a slow and difficult job, and most printing was just in black and white. Imagine a world without colorful book reports or printed photos of your birthday party. I was created to solve that problem and splash some color into everyone's life.

My story begins back in the exciting 1970s. All around the world, in busy labs at companies like Canon and HP, clever engineers and scientists were trying to figure out a better and faster way to print. They wanted everyone to be able to print things easily. In Japan, a very smart engineer from Canon named Ichiro Endo was working hard on this very problem. One day, around the year 1977, something amazing and unexpected happened. It was a happy little accident. Ichiro was busy with an experiment in his lab. He was holding a hot tool, a bit like a tiny hot poker, and he accidentally touched it to the tip of a syringe, which is like a needle, that was filled with ink. Whoops. But then, pop. A tiny, perfect little drop of ink shot out of the needle and landed on his paper. His eyes opened wide with surprise and wonder. He wasn't upset about the accident at all; he was thrilled. He realized that heat could make ink jump. This gave him the most wonderful idea of all. He thought, 'What if a printer could have tiny little heaters inside of it?'. Each heater could warm up a super small bit of ink really fast, creating a little bubble. When that bubble popped, it would push, or 'spit', a perfect dot of color onto the paper. By spitting thousands and thousands of these tiny dots in just the right places, I could paint any picture or write any word you could imagine. It would be like a super-fast artist painting with dots. That one little accident was the secret to how I was born, all thanks to Ichiro's clever mind.

At first, I was a very big and heavy machine. You would mostly find me in busy offices, whirring and clicking as I printed important papers for grown-ups. But the clever people who made me kept working to make me smaller and friendlier. Soon, I was small enough to sit on a desk right in your home. That’s when my real adventure began. I got to help kids just like you. I print out your homework with neat letters and your book reports with colorful pictures of planets and animals. I get to see the amazing drawings you create on your computer and bring them into the real world for you to share. When your family goes on vacation or celebrates a birthday, I help you print the photos so you can remember those happy times forever. I love being a part of your homes, helping you learn and create. My job is the best in the world because I help bring your imagination to life. Every time you print a drawing or a story, you are sharing a piece of your colorful world, and I get to help you do it.