Samuel Colt
Samuel Colt was an American inventor, industrialist and businessman. Colt made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable. His firearms were used widely during the settling of the western frontier. His innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements, and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer of advertising, product placement and mass marketing.
About Samuel Colt in brief
Samuel Colt was an American inventor, industrialist and businessman. Colt made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable. His firearms were used widely during the settling of the western frontier. Colt’s manufacturing methods were sophisticated. His innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements, and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer of advertising, product placement and mass marketing. Colt died in 1862 as one of the wealthiest men in America. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Christopher Colt, a farmer who had relocated his family to the city after he became a businessman, and Sarah. His maternal grandfather, Major John Caldwell, had been an officer of the Continental Army; one of Colt’s earliest possessions was John’s flintlock pistol. Colt’s mother died from tuberculosis when Colt was six years old, and his father remarried two years later, to Olivia Sargeant. His oldest sister, Margaret, died of tuberculosis at age 19, and the other, Sarah Ann, later committed suicide. A third brother, John C. Colt, a man of many occupations, was convicted of an 1841 murder and committed suicide on the day he was to be executed. On a voyage to Calcutta aboard the brig Corvo, Colt had the idea for a type of revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan, or windlass, which had a ratchet and pawl mechanism which he would later say gave him the ideas for his revolver designs. When Colt returned to the United States during 1832, he resumed working for his father, who financed the production of two guns, a rifle and a pistol.
The first completed pistol exploded when it was fired, but Colt had to find a way to pay for the development of nitrous oxide. He started a portable laboratory on his father’s textile plant, so he earned a living performing demonstrations across the U.S. and Canada. As Colt realized that sales decreased, he began doing the same lectures on street corners and in museums. Colt conceived himself as “the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New-York, London and Cal cutta”. He thought if he could enlighten people about a new idea, he could turn more receptive to his new idea concerning nitrous Oxide. He had a patent for a revolver in 1847, but his father would not finance any more development, so Samuel needed to find an alternative way to make a living. He built a homemade galvanic cell and advertised as a Fourth of July event during that year that he would explode a raft on Ware Pond using underwater explosives; although the raft was missed, the explosion was still impressive. During 1829, at the age of 15, Colt began working in his father’s textile plant in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had access to tools, materials, and factory workers’ expertise. Later, after hearing soldiers talk about the success of the double-barreled rifle and the impossibility of a gun that could shoot five or six times without reloading, Colt decided that he wanted to create the “impossible gun”.
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This page is based on the article Samuel Colt published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
