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  During his two decades at Harpers Ferry, Hall developed a number of innovative tools, including drop hammers, stock-making machines, balanced pulleys, drilling machines, and special machines for straight cutting—a forerunner of today’s milling machine, a critical tool used in the fabrication of precision metal firearm components.18 His precision-manufactured machine-made rifle parts were completely interchangeable, thus eliminating the need for skilled craftsmen to repair broken arms. As with other important techniques, many innovators took part in creating the “American system of manufacture,” but Hall was certainly one of the method’s pioneers and played an important role in its realization.

  By most accounts, Hall was not an easy man to do business with: he had constant run-ins with his superiors. At one point there were congressional calls for more study of the utility and costs of Hall’s rifles, the aim of which was to show that they were a waste of funding. In the end, the episode only enhanced Hall’s reputation when the resulting report found that the guns “have never been made so exactly similar to each other by any other process. [The] machines we have examined effect this with a certainty and precision we should not have believed, till we witnessed their operation.”19 After this, Hall’s ideas spread rapidly to the Springfield Armory and other private armories. He devised gauging systems to maintain accuracy, and when Simeon North began building Hall rifles in Connecticut, these gauging systems ensured that parts were interchangeable between rifles from the two armories. Others in the private sector would soon take those ideas and, without bureaucratic meddling, perfect them and change the way the guns operated.

  9

  PEACEMAKER

  “God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.”

  —Unknown

  Steel engraving of Samuel Colt with a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver

  Like the Kentucky rifle before it, the revolver was a distinctly American invention. Unlike the Kentucky rifle, however, the revolver’s development, production, and popularity can be largely attributed to one man, Samuel Colt. The Connecticut native was not merely a mechanical virtuoso but a promotional and manufacturing mastermind who would become a template of the nineteenth-century American industrialist, epitomizing the exuberance and possibilities of the populist era of mid-1800s American life. A self-made man, Colt was prodigious, a tireless self-promoter, innovator, autodidact, and mythmaker. His nose for opportunity made him one of the wealthiest men of his day. With this success came a leap forward in firearm technology. Colt invented the first hands-on, workable, mass-produced revolving firearm. And with his gun, he became one of the first industrialists to take advantage of mass marketing, celebrity endorsements, and corporate mythology to sell his product—a success that laid the groundwork for twentieth-century businessmen, including Henry Ford. In practical terms, his gun was more deadly, more accessible, more dynamic, and more useful than any that had ever been designed. It would play a part in carving out the West, revolutionizing war, and transforming the role of the gun in modern American life.

  The Colts had been in Connecticut since the 1630s. Samuel’s maternal grandfather, John Cakhvell, had established the bank in Hartford, while his grandfather, Peter, a Yale graduate, played a role in the Revolutionary War, working on the Committee of Inspection in New Haven. Peter’s experience during the war, obtaining provisions not only for American troops but for the French army, helped secure contracts and trade deals in major power centers of the budding nation. Peter’s post-revolutionary life was the epitome of what the historian Barbara Tucker referred to as the “ethos of the new capitalism” of the early nineteenth century. It was a time that saw the egalitarian ideas about commerce that had dominated the previous century start to dissipate. Men like Peter, John, and Sam engaged in speculation, making and losing fortunes, often living restless and nomadic lives. Ambition became a Colt family trait.

  Sam Colt was born in the Lord’s Hill neighborhood in Hartford—named not after the Almighty but rather one of the city’s original settlers, Captain Richard Lord—on July 19, 1814, only a few days before the Americans and British would fight one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812 at Niagara Falls. For all its success, the Colt family was also seized by tumultuous affairs, mental instability, and tragedy. Sam’s mother passed away when the future gunmaker was just six years of age. One of Sam’s sisters passed away in childhood. Another, Margaret, died from tuberculosis at the age of nineteen. His older brother John tried his hand at various vocations, struggling at all of them, before he was convicted of the infamous murder of a printer named Samuel Adams. The pair had argued over a bill of less than $20 before John murdered Adams with a hatchet and then allegedly stuffed the body into a packing case, which he put on a packet bound for New Orleans. John committed suicide before his execution. Colt’s sister Sarah Ann also committed suicide.1 His other brother, Christopher, who had married into a family of slave traders, lived a wayward life that included intermittently demanding money from his far more successful brother. He struggled with depression and resentment until his death.

  Sam was different. Growing up, Colt worked first in his father’s dye and bleaching factory in Ware, Massachusetts, before apprenticing on a farm. From all accounts, the young Colt’s upbringing was almost entirely free of parental supervision. In this environment, the curious boy could focus on his interests, one of them being guns. In a fawning and sometimes unreliable account, his first biographer tells the story of a search party finding the missing young boy “sitting under a tree in the field, with a pistol taken entirely to pieces, the different parts carefully arranged around him, and which he was beginning to reconstruct. He soon, to his great delight, accomplished the feat.”2 Whether this tale serves as a self-serving myth or not, it’s clear that Colt had a propensity for mechanical things and great resourcefulness. He was already experimenting with new technology in the field in his mid-teens. After a home-brewed pyrotechnic display during a Fourth of July celebration at his local high school, Colt, anticipating expulsion, took leave of formal education forever.

  Prompted by his father, Sam began toying with the idea of becoming a sailor—traveling as far as England and India on a merchant ship. Although the physical hardship of seafaring life quickly cured him of any ideas of taking to the sea as a way to make a living, it’s during this time that he first carved a crude model for a wooden revolver.3 Returning to the United States, Colt borrowed money from family and took his mock-up to Anson Chase, a Hartford gunsmith, asking him to transform this skeletal idea into a gun. He did. But when the young inventor tested out his new machine in the back firing range, it blew up in his hand at the first squeeze of the trigger.

  Colt offered various accounts of how and why he had hatched the idea for a chambered rotating weapon. He maintained, for example, that as a sailor he had been transfixed by the motions of the rotating mechanism of the ship’s capstan. Other times, Colt claimed that the idea had been birthed after reading harrowing tales of Native American attacks on settlers heading to the West. Why was the settler able to shoot only once, he wondered, before being seized upon by Indians who could unleash a torrent of arrows at the same time? In 1851, Colt told the Institution of Civil Engineers in England that after years of reflection and repeated trials, “without having seen, or being aware, at that period (1829), of any arm more effective than a double-barrelled gun having ever having been constructed, and it was only during a visit to Europe, in the year 1835, that he discovered he was not the first person who had conceived the idea of repeating fire-arms with a rotating chambered-breech.”4

  Although he certainly reimagined and perfected the idea, it seems unlikely that Colt was unaware that multi chambered guns already existed. Pepperbox pistols, for instance, were widely owned and used by the time Colt was carving out his wooden model. Named after the pepper grinders they resembled, these handguns had to be manually rotated, and were notoriously unreliable and difficult to aim because of the front-loaded weight of the multiple barrels. The year Colt was b
orn, the Boston inventor Elisha Collier (along with a colleague, Artemus Wheeler) had taken out a patent on a five-shot flintlock model pistol. Collier’s development was to invent a gun that was “self-priming”: in other words, when the hammer of the weapon was cocked, a compartment automatically released a measured amount of gunpowder into the pan for another charge. Had the United States Army showed more interest in the idea, perhaps Collier would have come to worldwide renown. As it was, the British ordered 10,000 pieces, using them in colonial India. Many problems plagued Collier’s early models, however, namely the cost of creating revolving mechanisms and the excruciatingly long time it took to load the gun. This impediment made the most attractive aspect of the gun, the potential to fire it quickly in succession, almost moot. Colt and other inventors would soon fix this problem.

  But before Colt undertook his most prosperous projects, he cultivated a knack for showmanship—a crucial aspect of his future success—by joining the popular Lyceum circuit. During the mid-1800s, there was an explosion of traveling shows that entertained teeming crowds on fairgrounds across the United States and Canada. Founded in 1826 by Massachusetts native Josiah Holbrook, the events featured self-styled experts, performers, salesmen, puppeteers, hucksters, polemicists, noted authors, and dozens of other varied speakers and showmen, who sold their wares, exhibited their exotic animals, performed tricks, and gave lectures on issues of the day. In towns across North America, the curious local communities, starved for access to technology, gadgetry, and entertainment, also treated these events as a form of social and intellectual enrichment. In a time before television, radio, or phonographs, this touring event was, for many people, the only way to hear, see, or learn about new ideas.

  Colt, we imagine, viewed the endeavor more as a capitalistic opportunity than a societal good. Growing a beard to hide his young age, Colt toured the country as “the celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London and Calcutta,” posing as a medicine man with a portable chemical laboratory. Sam amused crowds by administering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Such an act might seem cheap to our modern sensibilities, but it was not only rather harmless but exciting for men and women living in the new and sometimes isolated communities in America.

  Colt’s forays into the heart of America also helped him comprehend not only the size and scope of the new land but, as he later noted, the overwhelming need of those Americans to feel safe. The excursion was also useful in that Colt learned the art of public speaking, made numerous contacts around the country, and earned enough money to provide seed capital for his planned firearm business. Colt’s instincts as a salesman rarely failed him. And throughout his time artificially inducing laughter, he continued to ponder the serious problem of a revolving gun, as letters and blueprints of prototypes from this era show.

  Finally, at the age of twenty-one, Colt decided to patent the idea he’d been toying with for years: the repeating revolver. He did so, first in England and France, where it was cheaper and simpler, and then in the United States in October 1835. It made a singular technical advance—what may seem obvious to us now: rather than relying on five barrels, Colt’s invention had a rotating cylinder that came into alignment with a single barrel. When cocked for firing, the next chamber revolved automatically to bring the next shot into line with the barrel. The gun included a locking pawl to keep the cylinder in line with the barrel, and a percussion cap (more on this later) that made it more reliable than any other gun available. His design was a more practical adaption of Collier’s earlier ideas and created a far more balanced and lighter weapon with a sleeker design. In a short time this modernization would become the dominant mechanism of American weapons. The patent protected Colt’s fundamental ideas until 1857, by which time he was enormously wealthy and world-famous.5

  First the young inventor had to figure out how to mass-produce his idea. Although Colt relied on members of his family for funding, he lived in an era when high debt and speculative investment were no longer frowned upon—and Colt wasn’t shy about participating. In 1836 he began wooing wealthy investors, demonstrating his inventions in an upscale showroom in Manhattan, raising around $300,000—a huge amount at the time—to launch his project, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company. Based in Paterson, New Jersey, then one of the fastest-growing industrial hubs in the nation, Colt paid himself $1,000 a year, half of the profits semiannually, and another $6,000 for the patent. His ambitious plan was reflected in the ostentatious design of his new factory, a four-story armory featuring an ornate exterior. “On the spire which surmounted the bell tower was a vane very elaborately made in the design of a finished gun and in front of the mill was a fence, each picket being a wooden gun,” one contemporary commenter would note.6

  The first gun manufactured in the new Paterson factory was not a pistol but a Model Ring Lever rifle. However, it was followed shortly by the first Colt Paterson, a five-shot revolver that came in a .28-caliber, although soon Colt also began producing a .36-caliber model. The original gun featured no loading lever, so a shooter had to partially disassemble the revolver every time he wanted to reload it. But by 1839 a reloading lever and a capping window were incorporated, allowing the shooter to reload without disassembly, making it the most user-friendly gun ever invented.

  Colt understood that on some level he would be reliant on military contracts for his success. More than merely a fiscal benefit, such deals were a way to spread the word. “Government patronage . . . is an advertisement if nothing else,” he later noted. So when, in 1837, the Senate passed a resolution calling for testing of new weapons at West Point, Colt submitted a number of his guns for review. They would not be favorably evaluated. The most common complaint about the Colt guns was the prohibitive cost, but there were bad reviews about the quality as well. Certainly the first Patersons were unreliable when compared to later models. Among other problems, the Army noted that they were difficult to figure out because the new percussion arms were not yet being widely used. The Ordnance Department observed that the Colt was “entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service.”7

  Not for the last time in his career, Colt would feel that he had been treated unfairly by the government. He wrote a five-page letter meticulously contesting every single criticism offered by the board. Colt rapped the board for reaching the “wrong conclusion,” not only offering his own pushback but offering testimonials from military men, including one sergeant who wrote Colt that “in passing through Indian country, I have always felt safer with one of your rifles.”8

  Colt’s fortunes would change soon enough. In the winter of 1838, the United States was plowing tens of millions of dollars into the Seminole Indian War, which left more than a thousand Americans and an unknown number of Indians dead. It was an ugly affair that saw the sides lobbing brutal attacks back and forth, the Indians effectively deploying guerrilla warfare and Americans ratcheting up the violence in retaliation. At the height of the conflict, Samuel traveled to Florida to demonstrate his guns to the troops. With an array of his rifles and new revolvers, the inventor made his way to Fort Jupiter and put on a demonstration that went far better than his previous endeavors. Major General Thomas Jesup had only praise for the revolving weapons, writing a superior that “I am still confident that they are the only things that will finish the infernal war.” Now there was a new technology to deal with a new kind of war. The guns were put to immediate and effective use—so much so that Colt complained in 1851, in rather blunt terms, that by the effectiveness of his gun in “exterminating the Indians, and bringing the war rapidly to an end, the market for the arms was destroyed.”9

  Although never shy about lobbying government officials in Washington, Colt spent the rest of his life directly approaching military men, building relationships that helped him not only sell his gun but build its legend. Sam had a particular knack for sensing the flows of history, and during his relatively short life he befriended many of the great names of the era, including General Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, and Colon
el Jefferson Davis (a man who would become secretary of war before being elected president of the Confederacy), among many others. Colt kept a book in which he saved all the letters of prominent men who used his gun, including revolutionary nationalists like the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and the king of Siam, among many others.

  By the time the Civil War was brewing, in fact, Colt could count on enough military supporters to print a twenty-page brochure extolling the virtues and tangible upside of using the Colt. He attached a long list of “distinguished officers” who could provide testimonials. It included military heroes, future presidents, and senators known to most Americans.10

  In Florida, however, fate seemed to be undermining Colt’s big breakthrough. On his voyage home, Sam’s ship capsized in St. Augustine Bay and he lost the Army check for $6,000. The Army refused to send another one, and his investors were dubious about his tale, leaving him in trouble.

  At this point his first foray into production was unsuccessful not only because the demand for the new gun was slow but because of Colt’s habit of profligate spending. Shareholders in the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company had begun to push him out. By 1842 his company had shuttered and auctioned off its most valuable machinery to many rivals and one of his largest stockholders. It was during these years that Colt began to invest his time and energy in other innovations.

  One of his most notable creations was a galvanic cell and underwater explosive—a “submarine” mine—meant to protect American ports from renewed threats of British naval assaults. The British had already made well-known advances in mining harbors, and Americans were concerned that they would again threaten the Eastern Seaboard over a dispute regarding the waters off New England.11 While researching his project at New York University, Colt collaborated with other inventors and scientists, including a teacher named Samuel Morse, who later invented a single-wire telegraph system. The two worked together on a partially implemented scheme to install a telegraph line from lower Manhattan to New Jersey. Morse used the battery from one of Colt’s mines to transmit a telegraph message from Manhattan to Governors Island when his own battery was too weak to send the signal. (The line was never completed.)