Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America - Jim Rasenberger

[Saluki]

I'm just finishing up this book which piqued my interest due to my deep dive into the gun industry before I invested in Smith and Wesson.  Sam Colt was an interesting figure.  He was like Elon Musk, in that he was a really smart guy and also something of a showman.  A less flattering description would be that he was scammy.  This book is extremely well researched and clears up a lot of the misconceptions which are so often repeated as part of Colt's marketing that they have become accepted as truth. 

 

He did not invent revolvers.  He probably saw one on a sea voyage he made to India when he was 16 (a Collier flint lock rifle) which had multiple chambers that you advance by turning it with your hand. He thought up the advancements that made it advance one way by pulling the hammer back (like a ratchet or a bike gear that only goes one way) and came up with a few modifications to prevent "chain firing" where the spark ignites every round at once.

 

His life was crazy.  His company failed a couple of times before he managed to get rich on the back of an order (and the marketing) from the Texas Rangers. When he needed money he used the knowledge of chemistry that he learned from making dyes at a textile mill to make laughing gas and would go from city to city as "Dr Coult" and get people high on it in auditoriums as entertainment.  He came up with the idea for the revolver pistol with the innovations but they were just drawings and a guy named John Pearson, who is never credited, figured out how to turn those sketches into a working gun.  

 

Colt was genuinely a smart guy.  He worked with Morse to develop the telegraph and also had another failed company that used wires and underwater mines to blow up enemy ships. The world was smaller then and everyone knew each other so the amount of famous people you run into seems implausible in today's world. Two of his investors were brothers in law. One of them, named Whistler, had a son who painted...Whistler's Mother.  In a demo of one of his pistols, it spooked a horse which was pulling John Adams carriage and killed the driver.  He was so upset by this that he asked for a postponement in the closing argument he was giving.  The case was about the Amistad. He didn't have a factory when a big order came in, so he partnered with Eli Whitney's son. 

 

This book did a great job of separating fact from fiction because Colt was such a braggart and salesperson that his facts would change in retelling to fit whatever would help him sell more guns.  He claimed he read about a slave uprising and imagined a pistol with many bullets to help the slave owners defend their family (the story he referred to happened a year after he came up with the gun). He claims he came up with the idea for the revolver by watching the ratchet wheel that picks up the anchor on a ship (he probably, like many people had seen the early Collier revolver rifles, or "pepperbox" pistols which had several complete barrels which rotated.)

 

Not something that will help your investing, but an interesting read.