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 Archimedes Palimpsest The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, which originally was a 10th-century Byzantine Greek copy of an otherwise unknown work of Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors. It was overwritten with a Christian religious text by 13th-century monks. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes' work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 on images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray. All images and scholarly transcriptions with metadata are now freely available on the web at the Digital Palimpsest, now hosted on OPenn and other web sites for free