High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! An automatic lathe is a lathe (usually a metalworking lathe) whose actions are controlled automatically. Although all electronically controlled (CNC) lathes are automatic, they are usually not called by that name, as explained under "General nomenclature". The first kinds of automatic lathes were mechanically automated ones, from the 1870s until the advent of NC and CNC in the 1950s and 1960s. CNC has not yet entirely displaced mechanically automated machines; in fact, it may still be many decades before that happens. The latter type of machine tool is no longer being newly built, but many existing examples remain in service.