In 1480, Leonardo Da Vinci designed a lathe powered by foot treadle, which allowed for constant rotation.
His parents were solidly working-class: his father was a lathe operator, while his mother was an accountant.
The lathe is a tool for making tools--it makes manual crafting tasks easier, allowing for increased production and lower costs.
Mr Cesar Santos, 55, lost the index and middle fingers on his right hand whilst operating a lathe in February 2012.
For any given good, be it a metal lathe or a silicon-wafer saw, most potential buyers will not have access to a physical auction.
With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek.
According to Mr Whittles, who led the investigation, Mr Santos had been asked to polish a work piece that had been put on to a lathe.
Armed with a 130-year-old Flather lathe and a 50-year-old Van Norman milling machine, the pair churn out only 100 reels a year and have a three-year backlog.
It may also be due partly to prejudice: Mr Cardoso is an ex-professor, Mr da Silva a former lathe operator and trade-union leader who never went to university.
The lathe, which is essential to make many of the more complex tools on the Forbes list, is a mechanism for rotating work to be shaped with a knife.
It's so useful that five out of our top twenty tools--the chisel, the lathe, the saw, the scythe and the sword--are themselves forms of the knife, specialized for different circumstances.
How about an airplane engine or an industrial lathe?
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At the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan this week, she introduced 25 candlesticks designed with flakes of cast brass sparingly affixed to sleek, barely tapered cylinders lathe-turned from walnut wood.
Even those young people who hated maths in school find themselves wanting to know the formulae underlying what they are doing, he says, pointing to the lathe on which the apprentices learn how to cut metal.
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Yet there is far to go, and a shift in attitude is needed to match the city's transformation into a service-based economy, a realisation that serving in pubs and hotels is just as fulfilling as turning a lathe.
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