It needs other than manual power to subdue the metals to the present wants of man, and until those modern motor powers, such as steam, compressed air, gas and electricity, and modern hydraulic machinery, were developed, automatic machine tools to any extent were not invented. So, too, the tools that are designed to operate on hard metal should themselves be of the best metal, and until modern inventors rediscovered the art of making cast steel such tools were not obtainable. The monuments and records of ancient and departed races show that it was known by them how to bore holes in wood, stone and glass by some sharp instruments turned by hand, or it may be by leather cords, as a top is turned. _The lathe_, a machine to hold an object, and at the same time revolve it while it is formed by the hand, or cut by a tool, is as old as the art of pottery, and is illustrated in the oldest Egyptian monuments, in which the god Ptah is shown in the act of moulding man upon the throwing wheel. It is a device as necessary to the industrial growth of man as the axe or the spade. Its use by the Egyptians appears to have been confined to pottery, but the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Africans, and Hindoos used lathes, for wood working in which the work was suspended on horizontal supports, and adapted to be rotated by means of a rope and treadle and a spring bar, impelled by the operator as he held the cutting tool on the object. Joseph Holtzapffel in his learned work on _Turning and Mechanical Manipulation_, gives a list of old publications describing lathes for turning both wood and metal. Among these is Hartman Schapper’s book published at Frankfort, in 1548. A lathe on which was formed wood screws is described in a work of Jacques Besson, published at Lyons, France, in 1582. It is stated that there is on exhibition in the Abbott museum of the Historical Society, New York, a bronze drinking vessel, five inches in diameter, that was exhumed from an ancient tomb in Thebes, and which bears evidence of having been turned on a lathe. It is thought by those skilled in the art that it was not possible to have constructed the works of metal in Solomon’s Temple without a turning lathe. One of the earliest published descriptions of a metal turning lathe in its leading features is that found in a book published in London, in 1677-83, by Joseph Moxon, “hydographer” to King Charles II., entitled, _Mechanical Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy Works_. He therein also described a machine for planing metal. Although there is some evidence that these inventions of the learned gentleman were made and put to some use, yet they were soon forgotten and were not revived until a century later, when, as before intimated, the steam engine had been invented and furnished the power for working them.