Before Samuel Colt, cowboys shot like the aristocrats of pistol duels: one shot, a minimum pause of twenty seconds to reload and start again. The problem is that in the “Wild West” twenty seconds seemed like forever. At that time, they calculated, an Indian warrior could shoot up to six arrows. That’s why Clint Eastwood wears a Colt in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and John Wayne, in more than twenty-five films. That’s why Samuel Colt became a millionaire and changed American history.
At first, the inventor did not seem destined for success. As a child he liked to assemble and disassemble mechanical devices in his father’s factory, but he was kicked out of school for being a bad student. At the age of fifteen, he joined the crew of a ship to sail around the world, and there, observing the ship’s equipment, he had his great idea: a rotating drum that would allow a gun to fire several times without stopping to reload. He was not the first to devise a revolver, but he was the one who had the ability and determination to make it reliable, cheap and popular.
Before getting off the ship, Samuel Colt had already built a first model of the mechanism. Immediately afterward he spent two years touring the US as a traveling salesman. “Doctor” Colt sold the benefits of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and provided it to anyone who wanted a high. Thus, he saved enough for a first prototype and honed a marketing skill that would serve him well.
Although he wrote that he didn’t care about money in the slightest, Colt was careful to patent the invention in his name in the UK, France and the US before setting out to manufacture it. In 1836, with capital from his uncle, he set out to produce his first models of revolver and rifle, which he advertised as “easier to load,” “more stable in the hand,” and “with great rapidity in succession.” of downloads”.
Its natural client was the US Army, engaged since the founding of the country in continuous wars to expel Indian tribes from the lands they had occupied for centuries. However, despite Colt’s efforts to convince the War Department in Washington, the military found his invention too innovative, unreliable, and unnecessary.
Colt managed to make modest sales in the then independent republic of Texas and also in Florida, a border territory that was not yet a state. Both had one thing in common: they were places where there were white settlers who lived in hostile territory, far from the protection of the authorities and for whom shooting five times in a row without reloading was a blessing.
However, the sales were not enough to sustain a factory. Colt’s shareholders took management away from him and left him as a mere salesman. After six years, in 1842, the company closed and liquidated all weapons. Colt, who remained the owner of the patents, retired for a time to work on other inventions, such as underwater bombs, and failed in some other business, but fate was going to give him a second chance.
Their fortunes changed in 1846. The US was at war with Mexico and Texas had joined the country. That’s how Samuel H. Walker, a former Texas Ranger captain who had used his weapons fighting the Comanches, became an officer in the US Army and recommended him. “His pistols,” he said, “are the most perfect weapons in the world to keep the warlike Indian tribes at bay and to subdue the rebellious Mexicans.”
With their help, the inventor designed a new weapon that bore their names, the Colt Walker, and the Army ordered a thousand units from them. It was a huge order, especially for someone who had lost his factory four years earlier, but, with the support of a businessman friend, he managed to deliver the weapons the following year.
Colt focused not only on making improvements, but on using precision machinery to produce faster. In 1856 it was already making one hundred and fifty weapons a day and had the largest private weapons factory in the world.
Events, furthermore, continued to favor him. Added to the wars against the Indians and Mexicans was the California gold rush, in which thousands of people moved to remote areas where carrying a revolver gave them security. Shortly after, the civil war arrived in the United States. Colt was selling weapons to both sides until the days before the war broke out, when he became one of the major suppliers of the anti-slavery army.
In addition to technical reliability, Samuel Colt revealed himself to be a marketing genius. He associated his brand with explorers and adventurers, hiring some of them and turning their revolvers into a symbol of the West. Much of the American myth of the armed, fierce and independent cowboy can be linked to his advertising slogans, such as “God created men different, Colonel Colt made them equal.”
He also made the leap into the luxury sector. To promote exclusive weapons, he gave kings and aristocrats around the world pistols with gold and silver handles, carved with floral or animal motifs. They were made by a special group of goldsmiths that Colt had specially brought from Germany to his factory in Connecticut, where more than a thousand workers worked.
When Samuel Colt died, at the age of forty-seven, he was already the richest businessman in the country. In less than two decades he had manufactured four hundred thousand weapons and had revolutionized not only that market, but the history of the United States. The modernization of violence and the myth of the “Wild West” still have enormous consequences for his nation, although the man who inspired those traditions died without ever having shot anyone. Or so he said.
