page_title: Lathe
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lathe / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Gregorio Vara working on a chair leg at the workshop in Tenancingo, State of Mexico
context_page_description: A lathe is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object with symmetry about that axis.
context_section_description: The lathe is an ancient tool. The earliest evidence of a lathe dates back to Ancient Egypt around 1300 BC. There is also tenuous evidence for its existence at a Mycenaean Greek site, dating back as far as the 13th or 14th century BC.
  Clear evidence of turned artifacts have been found from the 6th century BC: fragments of a wooden bowl in an Etruscan tomb in Northern Italy as well as two flat wooden dishes with decorative turned rims from modern Turkey.
  During the Warring States period in China, c. 400 BCE, the ancient Chinese used rotary lathes to sharpen tools and weapons on an industrial scale.
  The first known painting showing a lathe dates to the 3rd century BC in ancient Egypt.
  The lathe was very important to the Industrial Revolution. It is known as the mother of machine tools, as it was the first machine tool that led to the invention of other machine tools. The first fully documented, all-metal slide rest lathe was invented by Jacques de Vaucanson around 1751. It was described in the Encyclopédie.
  In 1718 Russian engineer Andrey Nartov invented one of the first lathes with a mechanical cutting tool-supporting carriage and a set of gears (also known as a compound rest or slide rest) with the first to invent such a lathe probably being Leonardo da Vinci.
  An important early lathe in the UK was the horizontal boring machine that was installed by Jan Verbruggen in 1772 in the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. It was horse-powered and allowed for the production of much more accurate and stronger cannon used with success in the American Revolutionary War in the late 18th century. One of the key characteristics of this machine was that the workpiece was turning as opposed to the tool, making it technically a lathe. Henry Maudslay, who later developed many improvements to the lathe, worked at the Royal Arsenal from 1783, being exposed to this machine in the Verbruggen workshop. A detailed description of Vaucanson's lathe was published decades before Maudslay perfected his version. It is likely that Maudslay was not aware of Vaucanson's work, since his first versions of the slide rest had many errors that were not present in the Vaucanson lathe.
  During the Industrial Revolution, mechanized power generated by water wheels or steam engines was transmitted to the lathe via line shafting, allowing faster and easier work. Metalworking lathes evolved into heavier machines with thicker, more rigid parts.  Between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, individual electric motors at each lathe replaced line shafting as the power source. Beginning in the 1950s, servomechanisms were applied to the control of lathes and other machine tools via numerical control, which often was coupled with computers to yield computerized numerical control (CNC). Today manually controlled and CNC lathes coexist in the manufacturing industries.
caption: Craftsman Gregorio Vara working a chair leg on a lathe in Tenancingo, State of Mexico
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