Known as the "mother of machining tools," lathes can be used for a variety of purposes. 
These include shaping, drilling, sanding, knurling, turning, cutting, and deformation. 
This kind of versatility in a tool is hard to beat, and that's why so many metal- and woodworkers depend on lathes for the basis of their work. 

A lathe is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object with symmetry about that axis.