Question RE: History of the Lathe --- who invented it?

I don't have a clue as to when/where the lathe was invented, but evidence of the lathe's use has been indicated as far back as 300 BC in Egypt and Rome. See:

No-one knows. It's certainly ancient (Egypt had it). Chances are that woodturning began pretty soon after a culture developed rotary querns (grain mills) and the potter's wheel, then metal edged tools. There are no known examples of ancient woodturning with stone tools. (counter-examples welcome). The wood turning pole lathe came into Europe via the Greeks, around the 7th century BC.

A lathe has a few obvious characteristics. The most important is that, unlike most machine tools, a lathe can make something more accurate than the lathe itself. A newly technical society can thus make crude lathes from scratch and "bootstrap" itself into existence. Other machines, such as milling machines or even sawbenches, need a fairly well-developed industry to make them.

Another advantage of the lathe is that the workpiece is powered, not the cutting tool. A skilled craftsman can move the tool around, leaving the idiot apprentice to do the hard work. A stonemason OTOH, needs one person to be both skilled and strong.

Lathes are also versatile. Unusually, they can make both flat surfaces and parallel cylinders, either rods or holes. If you look at early-19th century maching, the lathe was almost the only machine tool yet developed. Machines such as steam engines developed around the shapes that the lathe could make, avoiding those such as large flat surfaces (which we'd now mill or plane) that were slow and expensive to dress by hand.

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

Andy Dingley snipped-for-privacy@codesmiths.com

When i've heard similar lathe praise, it's often the statement that the lathe is the king of tools, because it is the only tool that can make itself.

To me, it seems a suspect assertion. What's significant in machine-tool development in the Industrial Revolution is the replacement of hand methods by machines that were described as self acting, or automatic. Tools that applied power from a prime mover to internal rotative and reciprocal actions that replicated what formerly was done by hand. The lathe underwent this transformation, not with the development of head and tailstock to rotate work between centers, but with the use of a (usually) cast iron bed with ways on which a carriage could move a bit to and fro. The significance of the machine thereafter is not that "the work moves" but that the tool bit moves to take a cut unaided/unguided by the human hand. When this happened, 1800 and thereafter, the lathe (and similar tools) took a giant step in importance in Western technology.

And

In a way, the old reciprocal-drive steam engine is a lot like an iron planer. There are some old planers (and shapers) that run on a crank rather than a rack and gear. It was the development of iron casting that allowed all three devices, lathe, steam engine, and planer, to flourish. By the 1850s it was not uncommon for all three to be produced by the same builder.

Frank Morrison

I read recently and I don't remember which publication, that the Vikings used the lathe a lot to make everyday objects. I realize this is centuries after the Egyptians, but it's added info if you care to pursue it. Martin

Russell,

Hope this reply isn't too late - I've only just seen your message. The following two sites should give you some really good info. . . .

Ron Headon Swindon, England

This past summer I had the opportunity to see an exibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They had other artifacts in the exibit. One thing that caught my eye was a very large (approx. 3.5 feet high and 2.5 feet across) goblet shaped piece of stone. It was in perfect shape. The sign said that it was turned on a lathe. It would have been turned about 100 BC. The piece of stone they had to have used to make this piece must have been very large. How they attached it to an ancient lathe, how they turned the lathe and what they used to cut the stone is a mistery to me. But there it was.

Maybe it was turned on a vertical lathe?

With patience, a supply of harder pieces of stone is all thats needed as a tool.

Just thoughts...

Mike Patterson Please remove the spamtrap to email me.

The Vertilathe !

- Andrew

Unlikely (depending on your definition of "lathe").

Stone won't make shavings, so there's little advantage to rotating it continuously. Looking at Roman practice, such a piece may have been rotated on a turntable with templates, but the actual shaping is done with chisels as if it were a freehand carving.

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

Henry Maudslay invented the first metal lathe in 1797. I imagine that the inventor of the wood lathe is lost to antiquity. Simple bow lathes held by the feet and worked by the hands have been around for a long, long time.

The Industrial Revolution in the UK (the centralisation of spinning or weaving in large mills) is generally dated from about 100 years before the self-acting machine (Brunel's block-making machinery). The defining technology was that of powered machinery with a single dedicated (usually simple) function. The notion of a sequence of actions came later.

move a bit to and fro.

Fixed tools (in a toolpost rather than handheld) and bed slideways are ancient - we're back to Agricola territory here. I suggest getting a copy of L:TC Rolt's _superb_ "Tools For The Job"

There were many innovations in the lathe of the 1800's. The major one though is Whitworth's search for accuracy and repeatability, not any gross change on the lathe itself. Maudslay's screwcutter was already in use some decades before.

I've never seen a simple crank-action planer (a powered one - I have seen this for manual drives), although I'm sure they existed earlier. Equally I've never seen a rack and pinion planer (I have seen a few specialised keyway slotters that worked like this). All the planers I've seen, from the mid 19th to recent years, have used the Whitworth quick-acting crank mechanism.

Sorry, but I don't agree with a single point in your post. You're just plain wrong here - cite some references. Maybe things were different in the USA, but you're way off for Europe and certainly the UK (and in those days, we mattered).

The steam engine predates the development of casting, as refined by Wilkinson and his ilk. Sure, they made use of it later, but they were there before and their innovation wasn't driven by casting.

The development of planing machines _was_ driven by the steam engine - particularly Matthew Boulton's attempts to cut the cost of hand-dressing flat surfaces for slide-valve port surfaces, or for the horncheek surfaces needed to give sprung suspension to the increasingly heavy steam locomotives.

The lathe certainly wasn't driven by the steam engine. If anything, the steam engine, and the need to bore its cylinders, spurred the development of powered machining by tools other than the lathe. As steam engines grew, the idea of a boring machine and a static workpiece made more and more sense.

Name a manufacturer who made significant numbers of both steam engines and machine tools. There are those who made both lathes and armaments (Whitworth's rifle barrels and innovations in polygonal rifling), but there's no overlap with the steam engine makers - certainly not beyodn the days of Boulton and Watt.

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

Andy Dingley snipped-for-privacy@codesmiths.com

FM

AD

FM Textile history is beyond my grasp. I have not formed any conclusions as to its relation to machine-tool development. But if you are referring to power spinning, as developed by Arkwright and Strutt, that happened in the 1770s-80s, and the waterframe for automated cotton spinning brought to the United States starting about 1790, by Strutt's 21-year-old apprentice, Samuel Slater. In the U. S. power weaving was not generally in use until the second decade of the nineteenth century.

One of Slater's operatives appeared in my hometown, where a cotton power spinning mill started in 1807.

AD>

FM One of the problems with these discussions of the history of technology is that one seems to want to leap from culture to culture with comparisons (hence the original post as to who "invented" the lathe). I was only commenting on some of the technology in one period, in one culture (trans-Atlantic though it was), The Industrial Revolution, based on what I have read and discovered in my own investigations of some of the remaining machinery. Indeed, it's been some years, but I have read Rolt.

AD

FM One of the problems I find with the writings on lathe technology--including Rolt, and the emminently readable Samuel Smiles, the great early biographer of the English engineers--is in the importance that is given to the development of the leadscrew. I think there is some confusion as to whether machine-tool automation (rather than single-point thread cutting) came about using the screw for power. In my opinion the leadscrew usually was not used for power transmission, at least not in the U. S. Automation in U. S. engine lathes was achieved through a feed rod, not a leadscrew, at least so far as I have seen, generally speaking. Though a leadscrew is a component of many early machines, employed to make other leadscrew thread for machinery (square thread, then), it wasn't much used to produce screws for fastening. That was commonly done with a "nut tapping" machine by dies. The remaining early U. S. engine lathes (1820s-40s) that I have seen use a feed rod to move a carriage mounted on vee ways, not a leadscrew. The examples are few, though, so conclusions are still speculative.

And FM

AD

FM If you would look at the illustrations in Rolt, there are examples of both a crank shaper (Nasmyth) and rack/gear planer.

FM

AD

FM Again, if you look at Rolt--your own reference--at p. 97 he says that Maudslay himself built steam engines. (But, curiously, did not build lathes for production.)

There were many general shops in the U. S. that built whatever business came in the door. My own extreme familiarity is with the Putnam Machine Co. They built engine lathes (and ww lathes) from about 1835 to the 1920s; they built iron planers, shapers, column slabbers, etc., and starting in the 1850s a full line of reciprocating steam engines, having an 1856 U. S. patent for steam cutoff. The Lowell Machine Shop built machine tools (many designed by William Bement, c1850) and locomotives, as well as its primary product, textile machinery, as did the Amoskeag Mfg Co., in Manchester, NH, for a few.

AD

FM I don't have other commentary. One of the curious pieces of the puzzle here in New England is that steam technology was very late, because of the abundant water power, which was cheap to use. The PMCo, by the way, was somewhat of a rival to Whitworth. In the early 1860s it was chosen (Whitworth had also been considered) to outfit the first machine shops in China, erected to service the first marine steam in that country. Frank Morrison