Samuel Colt

Samuel Colt's mother died of tuberculosis when he was six, and his father shipped him off at eleven to work another man's farm rather than raise him. He preferred a science compendium to his Bible and, at fifteen, blew up a raft with a homemade battery for a Fourth of July crowd. A fireworks accident ended his formal schooling the following year. At sixteen, bored on a merchant ship bound for Calcutta, he watched the capstan's ratchet and pawl turning and carved a wooden model of a revolving pistol from scrap wood. With no money to build it for real, he spent years touring the country as "Dr. Coult," selling laughing-gas shows to strangers who had no idea they were funding a gun.

Colt patented his revolving pistol in 1836, and it immediately failed: the New Jersey company built to manufacture it sold almost nothing and closed within eight years. The comeback came from Texas — Captain Samuel Walker's 1847 order for a thousand revolvers, redesigned to his specifications, gave Colt the capital to build a real factory in Hartford. There, with machinist Elisha Root running the floor, he came closer than anyone before him to true interchangeable-parts manufacturing, machines finishing roughly eighty percent of every gun by hand. He marketed as hard as he engineered — engraved pistols sent to kings and sultans, paid newspapermen, a factory sign built to needle Parliament from across the Thames — and by his death the company had built more than four hundred thousand revolvers and made "Colt" the French word for revolver.

Colt's business rested on a monopoly he defended ruthlessly, suing rival gunmakers into shutting down revolver production for two decades — and, in the process, he dismissed a gunsmith's proposal for a bored-through cylinder that would have let his own guns fire self-contained cartridges. Smith & Wesson bought that patent instead and locked Colt's company out of cartridge revolvers until his monopoly finally expired. His family carried its own damage: his brother John was convicted of murder in 1841 and killed himself on the morning of his scheduled execution, and one of his sisters died by suicide as well. In 1861, weeks before the Civil War began, Colt sold two thousand revolvers to a Confederate agent, and Northern newspapers branded him a traitor even as he raised a Union militia regiment to answer them.

Colt died of gout in Hartford in January 1862, worth roughly fifteen million dollars, and his estate promptly became a court fight: a young man named Samuel Caldwell Colt produced a Scottish marriage license proving Colt had secretly married his mother years earlier, making the boy family rather than the "nephew" Colt had always called him. His widow, Elizabeth, spent part of the fortune on an Episcopal church filled with gun-and-tool carvings in his memory. The business outlived the scandal: the revolver became shorthand for the settling of the American West, "Colt" stayed in the French language as the word for the weapon, and in 2006 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Samuel Colt's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Colt Paterson revolver patent
  U.S. patent for a revolving gun, granted February 25, 1836 1836
• Colt Walker revolver invention
  Redesigned to Captain Samuel Walker's specifications for the Texas Rangers 1847
• Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company company
  The Hartford armory that pioneered interchangeable-parts production 1855
• 1851 Navy Revolver invention
  Became the standard sidearm for U.S. military officers 1850
• Waterproof submarine telegraph cable invention
  Developed with Samuel Morse for underwater telegraph crossings 1843

• July 19, 1814 aged 0 Born in Hartford, Connecticut
• July 4, 1830 aged 15 A fireworks accident ends his formal schooling
• 1832 aged ~18 Returns from a voyage to Calcutta with a carved wooden revolver model
• February 25, 1836 aged 21 Granted a U.S. patent for a revolving gun The Patent Arms Manufacturing Company was chartered in Paterson, New Jersey, days later.
• 1842 aged ~28 Demonstrates an underwater mine that destroys a moving vessel for the Navy
• 1843 aged ~29 The Paterson plant closes and its assets are auctioned off
• January 4, 1847 aged 32 Meets Captain Samuel Walker and takes an order for 1,000 revolvers
• 1855 aged ~41 Opens the Colt Armory in Hartford
• January 10, 1862 aged 47 Dies of gout in Hartford

• Robert Fulton 1765–1815
  Engineer and inventor whose steamboat Clermont revolutionized American river transportation. inspired by
• Samuel Morse 1791–1872
  Painter and inventor who developed the telegraph and Morse code, enabling instant long-distance communication. partnered with
• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. demonstrated his revolver to
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. opposed