The Earle family : Ralph Earle and his descendants

Gen.] GENEALOGY. Ill
many competent judges from past experience and knowledge are
considered the best yet used."
The card pricking and setting machine and the machine for making
lace, have been declared to be the two greatest triumphs of human
ingenuity. A gentleman, seeing, for the first time, one of the card
machines in operation, watched, in silent admiration, its marvellous
movements, and at length exclaimed, " Why ! it thinks " ! And it is
said that when the question of the extension of the Whittemore
patent was before Congress, John Randolph, of Roanoke, advocated
that extension in his own vigorous language. "Yes, I would renew
it to all eternity, for it is the only machine which ever had a soul."
As an "expert" in that machine, William B. Earle, while he may
have had equals, has had no superior. He still lives at the age of 84
years, during the last thirty of which he has been blind as a conse-
quence of a severe ophthalmia.
His history furnishes a somewhat rare example of physical courage
and endurance of pain. At the age of 14 years an abscess—the so-
called " fever-sore"—formed in his left arm, and troubled him about
thirty years. The use of the arm was permanently impaired. The
bone became involved in the disease, was partially destroyed, and at
length replaced by a new one, the remnant of the old one still
remaining as a source of irritation. He consulted a surgeon in
regard to an operation for its removal, but the advice which he
received conflicted with the interests of his business, and was not
followed. One day at his factory, when the arm was unusually
troublesome, he put a keen edge upon his large pocket knife, called
together his workmen to be witnesses of his surgical skill, sat coolly
down, plunged the knife to the bone a little below the shoulder, laid
the bone bare by a cut nearly six inches long, and took out the old
bone, the largest piece of which was nearly four inches in length.
The arm was then dressed, healed favorably and soon, without taking
him even for a day from his business, and has never since troubled
him, except by the limited power of motion which had become
established before the operation.
Pliny Earle, Jr. [875-8], received his last literary education in
1827, at the Friends' School in Providence, R. I., where he served
as an assistant teacher during the winter of 1828-29. Early in 1831
he was again appointed to that position, where he passed through
the several grades of assistant, and in 1835 was promoted to the
office of Principal.