Standard Catalog of Colt Firearms. Rick Sapp

THE RAMPANT COLT:

       SAM COLT

       (1814 - 1862) – American Genius, American Original

      Sam Colt was a prodigy. In 20 years, he went from penniless to immensely wealthy; from being a literal nobody to consorting with the richest, most famous and, occasionally, the most powerful people in the world. Beginning with a prototype revolver carved from a chunk of wood, he orchestrated a firearms revolution and organized one of the largest and most successful industrial enterprises in America. Almost 200 years after his birth, his story is still amazing and inspiring.

      The son of a sometime farmer, sometime small businessman, Samuel Colt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814. Although his father and stepmother worked hard to give him a good education – his biological mother died when he was just a few years old – at the age of 11, he was indentured as a farm servant. And like most rural youngsters, he was at home with the muzzleloaders of the day.

      As a youth, the boy had a profound mechanical curiosity and was greatly influenced by a book titled the Compendium of Knowledge, an encyclopedia of a scientific nature. This book contained articles about inventors such as Robert Fulton who – by linking an idea with a challenge, and with the ability to work mechanically with gears, wheels and levers – succeeded in expanding the frontier of human accomplishment. When Sam’s father subsequently took over the operation of a Massachusetts textile mill, the young Sam worked there also.

      Shortly afterward, Sam Colt spent a year at sea. It may very well have been there, watching the action of the ship’s wheel as it spun and locked (or perhaps the capstan, a rotating wheel used to control lines to sails and spars, and to redirect the force of the wind) controlling the sailing ship’s movements, that he conceived his idea for spinning or rotating chambers that would hold firearms ammunition. On board the ship, he even worked with the carpenter to carve a realistic model of a six-shooter. The boy was just 18 years old.

       The best-known American gunmaker of all time, Samuel Colt (1814-1862).

      Returning to New England, Sam and his father commissioned several gunsmiths to build revolving cylinder firearms to Sam’s specifications, but because the Colts lacked the finances to hire truly first-class metalsmiths, these models operated poorly or not at all. One of the first two exploded in Colt’s hands. So to raise money to bring his ideas to fruition, the young man took to the road as an entertainer (“Doctor Coult of Calcutta”) giving lectures about and demonstrations of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) in fairs and auditoriums from the Mississippi River to Montreal.

      The income from his laughing gas tour allowed him to commission excellent working models and engineering drawings of his revolvers. The tour also gave him valuable experience in promotion and marketing, experience he would soon put to the test with his own inventions. At just 21 years of age, in 1835, he sailed to England and France to patent his revolver, fearing that the Europeans would immediately pirate his work. Afterwards, he returned to the U.S. and patented his drawings and ideas at home.

      In his book COLT: An American Legend, R.L. Wilson reminds us that when Colt organized his first factory in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1836, the president of the U.S. was Andrew Jackson, and that the Union encompassed only 25 states and a vast frontier had been purchased just 33 years before by Thomas Jefferson.

      Although that time seems an eternity ago, financing options were about the same. With patents, working models and a personal investment, Colt incorporated as the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, borrowed enough money to capitalize his factory and begin turning out revolving cylinder handguns, rifles and even shotguns for the cap-and-ball or percussion era that was replacing the older flintlocks.

      For a collector, finding a Paterson Colt in a dusty, rarely-visited attic would be better than finding a friendly Irish leprechaun willing to take him to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It did not turn out as well for Colt, however. His Paterson models were functional, even remarkable for the time, but hardly efficient or reliable. In New Jersey, Colt developed and produced three different revolving-cylinder handgun models – pocket, belt and holster; two types of revolving long rifle – one cocked by a hammer and the other by a finger lever or ring; a revolving carbine; and a revolving-cylinder shotgun. In all cases, gunpowder and bullets were loaded into the front of the cylinder while the primer was inserted into a hollow nipple located on the outside of the cylinder, where it would be struck by the hammer when the trigger was pulled.

      But Sam Colt’s designs were still immature and the black powder of the day was extremely “dirty,” leaving a great deal of fouling that complicated the functioning of moving parts. For these reasons and because of the lack of government orders, Colt closed the doors of his Paterson enterprise in 1842.

      Nevertheless, Colt’s Paterson plant did in fact produce working models of multi-shot handguns, rifles and shotguns. His guns were used in the Seminole War in Florida and, most important, in the fighting to establish the Republic of Texas that would culminate in the Mexican-American War.

      The Paterson failure was not the end of Sam Colt, though. Filled with ideas and with insufficient hours in the day to bring them all to life, he experimented with waterproof ammunition, underwater harbor defense systems via coordinated explosive mines and, with Samuel F.B. Morse, the telegraph. In fact, having narrowly averted a war with Louis Philippe’s France in the mid 1830s, the government awarded Colt $50,000 – an immense sum in those days – to further his plans for harbor defense. But hostilities with Mexico, from whom the U.S. demanded a huge chunk of territory, interrupted Colt’s East Coast harbor defense efforts and turned him, once again, into a firearms entrepreneur.

      It may have been luck, in the form of a couple of famous Texas Rangers, as much as his personal inventive genius that gave Colt a second chance. Captain Samuel Walker was recruiting for the fighting in Texas when he exchanged letters with Colt, whose Paterson guns he had used successfully against the Comanche. Many frontiersmen regarded that southwestern tribe as the finest light cavalry of the era. Working together, Colt and Walker soon developed a fresh design, more powerful and more reliable than Colt’s Paterson guns, and Colt induced Eli Whitney, Jr., son of the inventor of the cotton gin, to financially back his enterprise.

      Colt sold the subsequent 1847 Walker Colt percussion revolver to the government and to civilians alike. Based on the new designs, these guns were an immediate success and Colt was on his way to fame and fortune. Walker, on the other hand, died the following year, killed by the thrust of a lance during the Battle of Juamantla, near Tlaxcala, Mexico.

      By 1851, Colt was organizing and building a modern factory along the Connecticut River in Hartford. Four years later, the factory was fully operational and, incorporated as Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, was turning out fresh firearms models to supply a national sense of unrest and the flood of immigrants moving west. The California Gold Rush, the Indian Wars and looming sectional conflict that would become the Civil War, or War Between the States, fueled Colt’s armory and his almost boundless energy. Soon, a factory in London was also producing the indefatigable Yankee’s designs.

      In his new factory, which was built to the latest standards of the day, Colt lost no time in specifying interchangeable parts for his firearms, some 80 percent of which were turned out on precision machinery. Because of the undeviating attention Colt – and capable lieutenants such as Elisha K. Root, a long-time friend and highly qualified engineer – paid to the manufacturing process, the Hartford production machinery achieved a remarkably high degree of uniformity for the mid-19th century. Typically, the metal parts of a Colt revolver were designed, molded, machined, fitted, stamped with a serial number, hardened and assembled right there in Hartford.

      In the mid-1850s, Colt finished his remarkable factory and topped it with a marvelous blue