the.com/pottery wheel

means A rotating disc, spun by hand or motor, on which a potter centers and shapes wet clay into symmetrical vessels.

from The wheel itself is one of humanity's oldest technologies, and evidence suggests the pottery wheel came from adapting the same rotational principle — possibly derived from the slow turntable, a simple pivoted disc potters turned by hand to rotate a pot while hand-building it. Someone eventually figured out that spinning it fast and using centrifugal force plus wet clay could shape a vessel in minutes instead of hours, a leap found independently in several early civilizations. The word 'pottery' traces back to Latin 'potus' (drunk) via Old French 'poterie,' linking pots originally to vessels for drinking before the term widened to all clay vessels.