Ancient lathes were operated by hand or foot, using ropes to rotate the workpiece while cutting with a hand-held tool. In 1797, the British mechanical inventor Maudsley created the modern lathe with a screw-driven tool post, and in 1800, he adopted changing gears to alter the feed rate and the pitch of the thread being machined. In 1817, another Englishman, Roberts, used a four-stage pulley and back pulley mechanism to change the spindle speed. To improve mechanization and automation, in 1845, the American Fitch invented the turret lathe. In 1848, the American rotary lathe appeared. In 1873, the American Spencer built a single-spindle automatic lathe, and soon after, he built a three-spindle automatic lathe.
In the early 20th century, lathes with gearboxes driven by a single motor appeared. After World War I, due to the needs of the munitions, automobile, and other machinery industries, various high-efficiency automatic lathes and specialized lathes developed rapidly. To improve the productivity of small-batch production, lathes equipped with hydraulic copying devices were widely adopted in the late 1940s, and multi-tool lathes were also developed. In the mid-1950s, program-controlled lathes with punch cards, pin plates, and dial switches were developed. Numerical control technology began to be used in lathes in the 1960s and experienced rapid development after the 1970s.