W.F.& John Barnes was founded in 1872 and became especially well-known for their range of foot and hand-powered wood and metal-working machinery. Their metal-turning lathes were invariably, but not exclusively, of the lighter, treadle-powered type in the 9" to 13" range.
Today, the idea of using a treadle to drive a lathe seems very strange, but, before the advent of widespread electrical connections and inexpensive generating plant, it was a convenient (and healthy) way of powering small - and not so small - machine tools in remote and isolated places.  Naturally, the "treadler" was often a long-suffering apprentice or other assistant - and one cannot pretend that it must have been much fun. Professional machine shops in such areas, where they existed, usually employed a stationary "gas" engine to turn line shafting which could be employed to drive several machine tools at once. Of course, once you had your Barnes treadle lathe, you could contemplate building a small engine to drive it, and sets of casting to make them were very popular during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century.
Having sampled the craft of "treadle turning", I can report that it is a salutary lesson in the need to keep cutting tools sharp and correctly set. Any attempt to rush a job, or increase the rate of feed beyond what is reasonable, is met with instant, fatiguing feed back - and one quickly learns to reduce the amount of turning required to the very minimum. A surprising amount of energy can be absorbed by the drive to the leadscrew and the leadscrew bearings themselves; careful assembly and checking for free rotation of each component on the drive pays dividends on any small, low-powered lathe, treadle-powered or not. In common with many other makers of lighter lathes, many of the Barnes models were available with raiser blocks to lift the centre height an extra 6" or so.
The examples illustrated on the following pages represent the more common types produced by the company over the years - the range was large, and constantly evolving with many unrecorded detail changes made during production runs.

The 9" x 25" Barnes Model 41/2 was the smallest in the range and in its basic form was supplied with a single, swivelling tool slide. Although the drive to the leadscrew was devoid of tumble reverse, or even a dog clutch, there - as on most of the lighter Barnes lathes -  twin leadscrews to give an instant reverse to the carriage feed. The mandrel was bored through 3/8" and a backgear was fitted - an essential feature on any human-powered lathe. The saddle was unusual in not being allowed to contact the front top way of the bed, instead it rested against the front angled way and on top of the screw-on rack.  More details of this highly-unusual arrangement can be seen here.
The machine was available with a choice of either a conventional treadle, or a rather wonderful "bicycle" system. In the late 1870s, when the lathe was introduced, the term bicycle was not used so the mechanism was known by the contemporary French term Velocipede - the name originally given to the modified "Hobby Horse" with front-wheel pedals produced by Pierre Michaux in his Paris workshops during the 1860s. The introduction of the lathe also  coincided with the development of the first successful light-weight chain - and it was the incorporation of one of these that enabled the Barnes' engineers to design a neat, compact, low-energy loss drive system which turned an overhung flywheel on the outside of the left-hand leg.
The operator's seat, which could be slid along the bed and locked into a convenient position, resembled those fitted to early farm machinery - and indeed the lathe was often advertised through the medium of general and mail-order catalogs sent to farming and other remote communities. The lathe was, in both its general aspects and detailed design, typical of the lighter sort of machine produced during late Victorian times.