John Jacob Holtzapffel was born on 20th September 1768, just sixty-seven years after the printer had put the finishing hand to Reverend Pere Charles Plumier's L'Art de Tourner, at Lyon, the earliest known work devoted exclusively to the art of turning.

Perhaps fate decided at this time that sixty-seven years would be the life span of the infant Holtzapffel—Henry Maudslay would not be born in Woolwich for another three years. The Alsatian mechanic and the young blacksmith were to spend their entire careers in London during their working lives. The mechanic outlived the blacksmith by four years.

John Jacob Holtzapffel started in business for himself in the year 1794 at 118 Long Acre, and on 31st June 1795 delivered his first lathe to a customer, Mr. Crisp, for the sum of £25.15.0. Bramah's curt refusal to consider an increase in Henry Maudslay's salary of 30s. per week decided Maudslay to start in business on his own account, which he did in 1797 in Wells Street, off Oxford Street.

In the middle of February 1797 John Jacob Holtzapffel delivered his sixteenth lathe, his first Rose Engine, to a Mr. Jonter. The cost entered in the job book seems to be £36.19.0, but this can not possibly be correct. In my considered opinion the cost was possibly £336.19.0. Later Rose Engines cost £367.0.0. on the average, for the bare machine, no apparatus included.

John Jacob Holtzapffel delivered his second lathe to Dr. Eimble on 20th December 1795. This was his first "screw mandrel lathe", that is to say a traversing mandrel, one might say "screwing the mandrel and the screw blank (or work) past a stationary threading tool bit held in the slide rest." At the completion of each pass, the direction of rotation is reversed (the tool bit having been retracted) and then the cutting is repeated, a few thousandths of an inch deeper, and so forth.

The earliest known drawing of such a traversing mandrel, screw cutting lathe is to be found in a mediaeval house-keeping manuscript of the period 1480 in South Germany, in possession of the family van Waldburg-Wolfegg, (Wurttemberg). Helmuth Theodor Bossert and Willy F. Storck made up a facsimile reproduction in Leipzig in 1912. In the Holtzapffel arrangement a cap at the end of the mandrel is removed and replaced by a shorter screw guide, or master, of the desired pitch of thread. The screw guide is engaged by a conducting piece (or half-nut) below.

Possibly a year and a half later, sometime in 1797, Henry Maudslay built his classic screw cutting lathe with inter-changeable lead screws and, also, change gears according to some historians. But, if one could change the pitch of the lead screw, the gear trains only function was to connect the lead screw with the mandrel. It might have occurred to Maudslay, later, that the gear train might be altered to cut a new lead screw of a different pitch and perhaps this was the secondary purpose of the gear train— remember that Maudslay had also constructed, about the same time (c.1800) a machine for originating screw threads of any length—and pitch of thread, such as a lead screw for his lathe.