Editing Lathe (section)

== History ==
[[File:Lathe turned pillars at Chennakeshava temple in Belur.jpg|thumb|Lathe turned pillars at [[Chennakeshava Temple, Belur]]]]

The lathe is an ancient tool. The earliest evidence of a lathe dates back to 4th century BC [[Egypt]] an is a depiction in the tomb of [[Petosiris]]. There is also tenuous evidence for a turned artifact at a Mycenaean Greek site, dating back as far as the 13th or 14th century BC.<ref name="auto">{{cite web |url=http://www.turningtools.co.uk.wgo.ca/history2/history-turning2.html |title=A brief history of woodturning |last=Clifford |first=Brian |website=The Woodturner's Workshop |publisher=Woodturners' Guild of Ontario |access-date=2018-07-24 }}</ref>

Clear evidence of turned artifacts have been found from the 6th century BC: fragments of a wooden bowl in an [[Etruscan civilization|Etruscan]] tomb in Northern Italy as well as two flat wooden dishes with decorative turned rims from [[Asia Minor|modern Turkey]].<ref name="auto"/>

During the [[Warring States period]] in [[China]], {{Circa|400 BC}}, the ancient Chinese used rotary lathes to sharpen tools and weapons on an industrial scale.<ref>{{cite AV media |title=Emperor's Ghost Army |url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/emperors-ghost-army.html |format=Documentary|time=26:00|publisher=PBS|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160115023141/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/emperors-ghost-army.html|archive-date=2016-01-15|url-status=live}}</ref>

The first known painting showing a lathe dates to the 4th century BC in [[ancient Egypt]].<ref name="auto"/><ref>{{Citation |first1=Gale |last1=Rowena |first2=Peter |last2=Gasson |first3=Nigel |last3=Hepper |first4=Geoffrey |last4=Killen |year=2000 |title=Wood |editor1=Paul T. Nicholson |editor2=Ian Shaw |work=Ancient Egyptian materials and techniques |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=New York |page=357 |oclc=38542531 |isbn=0521452570}}</ref> [[Pliny the Elder|Pliny]] later describes the use of a lathe for turning soft stone in his [[Natural History (Pliny)|Natural History]] (Book XXX, Chapter 44).

[[File:Galica Vara Workshop016.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A craftsman working a chair leg on a lathe]]
Precision metal-cutting lathes were developed organically during the lead up to the [[Industrial Revolution]], with many inventors contributing. They were critical to the manufacture of mechanical inventions of that period. There are many claims in the literature for the person who invented the precision lathe.<ref name="Winchester"/>{{rp|64}} 
{{Blockquote
|text=...a professor...notes the competing claims and cautions against the "heroic inventor" treatment of the story. Far better to acknowledge, he says, that precision is a child of many parents, that its advances invariably overlap, that there are a great many indeterminate boundaries between the various disciplines to which the word ''precision'' can  be attached, and that it was, in its early days, a phenomenon that evolved steadily over three centuries of ever-lessening bewilderment. It is, in other words, a story far less precise than its subject.
|author=Simon Winchester
|source=''Exactly'' (2018)<ref name="Evens">{{cite book |last1=Evens |first1=Chris |title=Precision Engineering: An Evolutionary View |date=1998 |publisher=Cranfield Press |location=Cranfield, England |isbn=978-1871315011}}</ref><ref name="Winchester">{{cite book |last1=Winchester |first1=Simon |title=Exactly |date=2018 |publisher=William Collins |location=Dublin |isbn=978-0-00-824178-0 |edition=Paperback (2019)}}</ref>}}

Some of the earliest examples include a version with a mechanical cutting tool-supporting carriage and a set of gears by Russian engineer [[Andrey Nartov]] in 1718 and another with a slide-rest shown in a 1717 edition of the French ''[[Encyclopédie]]''. The slide-rest was a particularly important development because it constrains the motion of the cutting tool to generate accurate cylindrical or conical surfaces, unlike earlier lathes that involved freehand manipulation of the tool.<ref name="Roe1916">{{citation | last = Roe | first = Joseph Wickham | title = English and American Tool Builders | publisher = Yale University Press | year = 1916 | location = New Haven, Connecticut | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=X-EJAAAAIAAJ | lccn = 16011753}}. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 ({{LCCN|27024075}}); and by Lindsay Publications, Inc., Bradley, Illinois, ({{ISBN|978-0-917914-73-7}}).</ref>

[[File:Jan Verbruggen Foundry Drawing 47 Horizontal Boring Machine.jpg|thumb|Exact drawing made with [[camera obscura]] of horizontal boring machine by Jan Verbruggen in Woolwich Royal Brass Foundry approx. 1778 (drawing 47 out of set of 50 drawings)]]
By the 1770s, precision lathes became practical and well-known. A slide-rest is clearly shown in a 1772 edition of the Encyclopédie and during that same year a horse-powered cannon boring lathe was installed in the [[Royal Arsenal]] in [[Woolwich]], England by [[Jan Verbruggen]]. Cannon bored by Verbruggen's lathe were stronger and more accurate than their predecessors and saw service in [[American Revolutionary War]]. [[Henry Maudslay]], the inventor of many subsequent improvements to the lathe worked as an apprentice in Verbruggen's workshop in Woolwich.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://ocw.tudelft.nl/wp-content/uploads/ED2011_2_Fabrikagetechnologie.pdf |title=Development of Production Technology and Machine Tools (presentation notes) |last=Tomiyama |first=Tetsuo |date=2016-02-16 |website=OpenCourseWare: TUDelft |publisher=TUDelft |pages=18–21 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180725054610/https://ocw.tudelft.nl/wp-content/uploads/ED2011_2_Fabrikagetechnologie.pdf |archive-date=2018-07-25 |url-status=live |access-date=2018-07-24 }} {{Cite AV media |url=https://ocw.tudelft.nl/course-lectures/2-ontwikkeling-fabricagetechnologie/ |title=02. Ontwikkeling Fabricagetechnologie |trans-title=02. Development of Manufacturing Technology |date=2011 |last=Tomiyama |first=Tetsuo |medium= Lecture |location= Delft, Netherlands |language=en |publisher=TUDelft}}</ref>

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, [[servomechanism]]s were applied to the control of lathes and other machine tools via numerical control, which often was coupled with computers to yield [[Numerical control|computerized numerical control (CNC)]]. Today manually controlled and [[Numerical control|CNC]] lathes coexist in the manufacturing industries.