Okay, we checked out an obscure entry on a guy named Abel Buell in the 1999 edition of Encyclopedia Americana. The guy merited two paragraphs, detailing his birth, his death, and the stuff he did in between to get himself in an encyclopedia. It is pretty basic stuff. Enough to fill a school report about, oh, two paragraphs long, maybe three with clumsy paraphrasing. No picture of the guy or the stuff he invented so I still don't know what a lapidary machine is.
Sure the entry is probably sound. Some other guy probably had a chance to see records of birth and death and perhaps some contemporary reports, so we can reasonably expect the information to be correct, at least enough so that there's no point in trooping up to Connecticut to see the records for ourselves. But it's not very lively stuff. There's no way to make sense of the entry. It says he invented a lot of things but there's no sense if they were useful or not, or if he got taken to the cleaners. He died penniless so there's no way to know from the print entry.
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