It seems so hard to imagine that a metal lathe screw took so long to come along, but it was also the enormous cast base that made the lathe and industrial revolution possible.
The roundness produced by the potter's wheel seems so close conceptually to lathe work. I suppose that even now people struggle to understand that the lathe is the most important tool. It is the primary tool for center, and the only way to precision match a hole and a shaft. The lesser known is that a lathe with a lead screw of poor precision can be used to cut a more accurate lead screw over and over again by replacing each with the next. Precision flatness is actually done by hand scraping with a blade and Prussian blue. Flatness is gaged by a surface plate, but that is just rubbing two pieces of granite together with some fine wet abrasive in between. All it really took was a few steam valves from Watts, large scale iron castings, and the lathe with a driven lead screw to change the world. Yet here they were spinning nice precision round shapes in clay showing such an understanding of spinning machines over 500 years before.