Screw-cutting lathe name "screw-cutting lathe" carries a taxonomic qualification on its use—it is a term of historical classification rather than one of current commercial machine tool terminology. Early lathes, many centuries ago, were not adapted to screw-cutting. Later, from the Late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century, some lathes were distinguishable as "screw-cutting lathes" because of the screw-cutting ability specially built into them. Since then, most metalworking lathes have this ability built in, but they are not called "screw-cutting lathes" in modern taxonomy. The screw has been known for millennia. Archimedes devised the water screw, a system for raising water. Screws
Archimedes Palimpsest of the Walters Art Museum exhibit "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes". In 2015, in an experiment into the preservation of digital data, Swiss scientists encoded text from the Archimedes Palimpsest into DNA. Thanks to its deciphering, some mathematicians suggest, it is possible that Archimedes may have invented integration. It contains: The most remarkable of the above works is "The Method", of which the palimpsest contains the only known copy. In his other works, Archimedes often proves the equality of two areas or volumes with Eudoxus' method of exhaustion, an ancient Greek counterpart of the modern method of limits.