Samuel Colt

By Lucía Cárdenas

At sixteen, Samuel Colt shipped out as a seaman aboard the brig Corvo, bound for Calcutta, and spent the long voyage whittling. What he carved from wood was a small model of a pistol with a rotating cylinder, each chamber aligning in turn with a single barrel. He had seen ship's capstans and the ratcheting of the wheel, and he understood that rotation could solve the oldest problem of the handgun: a single-shot pistol was, after firing, a club. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, Colt returned with his model, secured patents in England and France in 1835 and in the United States in 1836, and opened the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey. The guns were ingenious and the company failed anyway, bankrupt by 1842: percussion caps were expensive, the mechanism was delicate, and America was not yet ready to pay for repeating fire. Salvation came from Texas. Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers, who had used Colt's pistols against the Comanche, wrote to Colt in 1846 asking for a thousand heavier revolvers for the Mexican War, and the Walker Colt, built by Eli Whitney's Connecticut factory, made the inventor's name on battlefields. In 1855 Colt opened his own armory in Hartford under a blue onion dome, and there he built something more important than any single gun: a factory where every part of every revolver was machined to gauge, so that any cylinder fit any frame and any trigger fit any lock. Workers assembled weapons from bins of identical parts instead of hand-fitting each one. The system, the American System of manufacturing carried to its logical extreme, let Colt turn out guns by the hundred thousand and made the revolver, simple and reliable, the sidearm of the American West, of both armies in the Civil War, and of police forces within a generation. Colt married, built a mansion called Armsmear beside his factory, and died in 1862, at forty-seven, one of the richest men in America. His widow Elizabeth ran the company for decades after him. Colt was as much a marketer as a manufacturer, and he understood that a weapon needs a mythology. He presented engraved revolvers to heads of state, staged public shooting exhibitions, and cultivated the aura of the frontier even from his Hartford office. The guns themselves evolved with the wars: the Walker Colt of 1847, built for the Texas Rangers, was a four-and-a-half-pound brute; the 1851 Navy, sleeker and balanced, became the best-selling percussion revolver of its era; the 1860 Army armed Union cavalry by the hundred thousand. In 1852 he opened a factory in London, an early experiment in multinational manufacturing that failed when British workers resisted his American methods. The Hartford armory, rebuilt after a fire in 1864, kept producing under his widow Elizabeth, who ran the company with a firm hand for decades and later endowed a church and a public park in Hartford. The firm's next immortal design, the Single Action Army of 1873, the 'Peacemaker,' came after Colt's death, but it was built on his system. The advertising slogan that trailed him, that God created men and Colonel Colt made them equal, was coined after his death, but it captured the brutal democracy his machine had introduced to violence.

Impact on civilization

Colt's revolver changed the arithmetic of personal violence, putting five or six shots into a single hand and thereby into the hands of soldiers, lawmen, settlers, and criminals on every continent; the peacemaking mythology of the American West is, mechanically speaking, his mythology. But the deeper transformation was industrial. Interchangeable parts, pursued ruthlessly in the Hartford armory, became the grammar of mass production: the same principle that let a worker grab any trigger from a bin would, within two generations, let factories assemble sewing machines, bicycles, automobiles, and eventually electronics. Colt did not invent the idea, but he proved it at scale and at profit, and the production line that defines the modern economy descends in a straight line from the blue dome on the Connecticut River. The manufacturing system mattered more than any single model. The armory practice of gauges, jigs, and specialized machine tools spread through American industry, was studied by European delegations, and became the template for the mass production of everything from sewing machines to automobiles. Henry Ford's moving assembly line was a descendant of Colt's insight that identical parts, made by machines, could be assembled by workers who had never met the designer. In that sense the revolver was the demonstration project; the real product was the method.