Inventing America, Colt’s Experimental Pocket Pistol

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re in collection storage in the Wadsworth Atheneum, looking at a little object made of brass and steel. It’s a gun, but it was never fired.

Brandy S. Culp: [0:16] It’s actually a prototype. It was designed by Elisha Root for Colt Manufacturing here in Hartford, Connecticut.

Dr. Zucker: [0:23] Colt was an incredibly important industry in this area. By the time Colt died, he was one of the wealthiest people in the country and perhaps in the world, a result of the manufacturing process that this gun represents.

Brandy: [0:36] Samuel Colt, at the age of 16, his life dream as a child was to be a merchant, a sailor. He gets on a boat, spends 10 months to the hot climes of India and realizes that he’d much rather be an industrialist. He has this vision. The vision is for the revolver. At that point in time, you have single-shot firing.

Dr. Zucker: [0:56] What Colt realizes is that one of the mechanisms on the ship that helped sailors tighten ropes, a kind of horizontal wheel that sailors pulled and clicked into place so that it wouldn’t reverse, that mechanism might help him develop a multi-chamber gun.

Brandy: [1:12] And so he comes home, and from that point on, this is his life ambition. He even goes so far as to become a traveling salesman, called Dr. Colt, who would administer laughing gas for funds. It’s this money that he uses to develop his first prototypes. He’s actually hiring traditional gun makers to create these prototypes at a high cost.

Dr. Zucker: [1:39] They were still hand-crafted, but this is the Industrial Revolution. Britain had made tremendous advances in harnessing the power of steam and manufacturing processes were becoming ever more efficient.

Brandy: [1:51] Thanks to Colt and his team of engineers, including Root, we outpace England in the Industrial Revolution and it becomes the American system that they then adopt.

Dr. Zucker: [2:03] In American mythology, we think of the assembly line as belonging to Henry Ford and his manufacture of the Model T, but in fact, it’s Colt that does this first.

Brandy: [2:13] It’s eight decades before Henry Ford that Colt envisions this interchangeable-part assembly line. Now you can take any guy off of the street, you can train him in a very specific task to perfection. It’s a whole system of workers that come together.

Dr. Zucker: [2:32] The putting together of those pieces was possible only if the pieces were made precisely enough. That is, the forging and the machining of these pieces had to be accurate enough so that any number of barrels could fit with the other parts, for example.

Brandy: [2:48] While Colt is this brilliant engineer, it’s Root who develops the infrastructure of the factory and the tooling and the machinery needed to make this happen. Meanwhile, Samuel Colt is focusing on marketing, and he’s using some pretty inventive strategies we would recognize today.

Dr. Zucker: [3:06] For example, early on in Colt’s career, when he wanted to sell some of his newly produced guns, he went to the front lines. The military had passed on an order, and so he went directly to the men doing the fighting and offered his guns. He’s not just selling to a domestic market, he’s selling to Britain, and through Britain, his guns are reaching as far as India.

Brandy: [3:25] He travels with some pretty prestigious people — including Samuel F.B. Morse, who had invented the telegraph, and they actually worked together as Colt explored underwater explosive technologies.

Dr. Zucker: [3:39] The result of the work that Root and Colt both did changed American history. His guns played a huge role in the Civil War, and in the post-war years, his revolvers are credited with winning the West.

Brandy: [3:51] If you think about some of the most significant happenings in the 19th century, the gun is there from the Gold Rush to the Mexican-American war, even the Seminole War.

Dr. Zucker: [4:04] It’s important not to romanticize these guns. Colt, when he went directly to the military to sell his guns, sold them for the express purpose of helping to eradicate Native Americans, for example, during the Second Seminole War.

Brandy: [4:15] Colt is a very complicated American figure at a complicated time in our history.

[4:21] [music]

This object at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Colt biography from Connecticut History

Museum of Connecticut History Research Guide for Colt Manufacturing

See primary sources related to Colt’s Fire Arms Manufacturing

Learn about the Eli Whitney Armory, an important predecessor to Colt’s factory

Read about the development of a market economy in the U.S. in the early 19th century

Review the impact and significance of the market revolution in the United States 

Key points

• Assembly-line methods of construction and more efficient manufacturing processes, like those developed by Samuel Colt and Elisha Root, shifted the center of the Industrial Revolution from England to the United States in the mid-19th century. These improvements were made possible by new levels of precision in the fabrication of individual components so that they could be mass-produced and fitted together by relatively unskilled laborers.
• The Colt gun was an economic success, not just because of the design innovations and manufacturing advances made, but also because Colt developed new strategies of marketing, selling his guns directly to soldiers on the front lines as well as to foreign governments.
• The advancement from a single-shot firing to a multi-chamber gun made the Colt revolver an important tool in American military campaigns during the 19th century. These guns played a role in the settling of the west and the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War and were used against Native Americans during the Second Seminole War.

More to think about

In the video, the speakers say, “It’s important not to romanticize these guns,” and describe Samuel Colt as a “complicated” figure in U.S. history. How do you think studying objects such as the Colt revolver can help us understand history from different points of view?