Potter

Turntable 

Many early ceramics were hand-built using a simple Coiling technique in which clay was rolled into long threads that were then pinched and beaten together to form the body of a vessel. In Coiling design, all the energy required to form the body of a piece is supplied directly by the hands of the potter. This changed with the introduction of the fast-wheel, early forms of which utilized stored energy in the rotating mass of the heavy stone wheel itself.

The wheel was dismantled and charged with energy by pushing it around with a stick, an arrangement that permitted the energy stored in the wheel to be finely directed to where it was necessary at the point where the hands of pottery comes in contact with clay . Unlike hand-building, in wheel-throwing most of the energy that does not come directly from the hands of the potter. The introduction of the fixed wheel brought benefits in terms of speed and a job that could have taken hours or even days to complete, was reduced to one that could be done in minutes.

Early ceramics built by Coiling often placed on mats or large leaves to allow them to be treated more conveniently. This arrangement gave the potter to turn the ship under construction, instead go around to add threads of clay, and it has been suggested that the earliest forms of the turntable is designed as an extension to this procedure. The earliest versions of the wheel were probably turned slowly by hand or foot, while Coiling a jar, but later developments allowed energy stored in a flywheel to be used to accelerate the process of throwing.

It is not known because turntable first came into use, but from 6000 BC to around 2400 BC have been proposed. Many contemporary researchers suggest that it first developed in Mesopotamia, although Egypt and China also has been claimed as possible places of origin. A stone potter's wheel found at the Mesopotamian city of Ur in modern Iraq has been dated to around 3000 BC, but fragments of wheel-thrown pottery of an even earlier date have been recovered in the same area. At the time of the early civilizations of the Bronze Age use of the turntable was widespread.

In iron-age lines in common use had a turning platform about a meter above the floor, connected by a long axle to a heavy flywheel on the ground. This arrangement gave the potter to keep turning the wheel rotating by kicking the flywheel with the foot, leaving both hands free to manipulate the vessel is under construction. Using the turntable was widespread throughout the ancient world, but was unknown in the pre-Columbian New World, where pottery was made by hand using techniques that included Coiling and beat. The use of motor-driven turntable has become common in modern times, although human-powered them are still in use and is much preferred by some potters.