Make magazine launched in 2005 and its first Maker Faire drew 22,000 people.
Dale Dougherty coined the term "maker movement" and launched Make magazine in 2005 through O'Reilly Media.1 The first Maker Faire, held in San Mateo, California, in 2006, drew approximately 22,000 attendees who came to exhibit, demonstrate, and share projects ranging from homemade robots to handcrafted furniture.2
The movement took shape at the intersection of affordable 3D printing, open-source hardware platforms like Arduino, shared workshop spaces called makerspaces, and online communities where people traded designs freely.
MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms launched the first Fab Lab network in 2001, and by the mid-2010s over a thousand fab labs operated in more than seventy countries.3 Public libraries began integrating makerspaces, adding 3D printers and laser cutters alongside bookshelves.
The maker ethos drew on a long lineage. The Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century had championed handmade production as a response to industrialization. The Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand beginning in 1968, had celebrated tools and self-sufficiency. The open-source software movement of the 1990s had shown that collaborative production without centralized ownership could work at scale.4
Make Media filed for bankruptcy in 2019.5 Community-organized Maker Faires continued independently in cities around the world. The movement's infrastructure, shared workshops, open designs, collaborative learning, outlasted the company that named it.