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

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Jim Rasenberger is the author of five books—A Perfect Coincidence; Revolver; The Brilliant Disaster; America, 1908; and High Steel—and has contributed to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, and other publications. A native of Washington, DC, he lives in New York City.

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Prologue PROLOGUE A Taste for Distasteful Truths

I

In 1831, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, aboard a ship called the Corvo, a sixteen-year-old American boy named Sam Colt was struck by an extraordinary idea. Exactly where he got the idea remains an open question. The common story is that he was inspired by observations he made aboard the Corvo, either of the ship’s wheel or, more likely, its windlass, the barrel-shaped crank that sailors turned to hoist the anchor. Others have suggested that he stole the idea from an inventor whose work he’d seen while abroad in India. Either version is plausible: Colt was certainly brazen enough to steal, but he was also ingenious enough to come up with a brilliant creation on his own. It’s also possible that the entire episode never happened and Colt made it up. He was capable of that, too.

In any event—as the story goes—Colt found a quiet moment on a glassy sea and pulled out the small knife a family friend had given him before the start of his voyage. He whittled at a few pieces of scrap wood to create a model of what he had in mind. When he was done, the thing in his hand resembled a small wooden pistol—a child’s toy—except that Colt’s creation, with its fist-shaped bulge above the trigger, would have appeared ridiculous to people who knew what a pistol looked like in 1831. He had carved an object that would expand the notion of how a gun was supposed to operate. In doing so, he had solved, or at least started to solve, one of the great technological challenges of the early nineteenth century: how to make a gun shoot multiple bullets without reloading.

For more than two decades after he returned home from Calcutta, Sam Colt would strive to perfect and market his “revolving gun” and wait for the world to catch up to his idea. In the meantime, he lived in perpetual motion—“centrifugal chaos,” one biographer has called it. At seventeen, he began touring the country as a traveling showman, selling hits of nitrous oxide to audiences in dire need of amusement. (The country was suffering a cholera epidemic at the time.) At eighteen, he went up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in a steamboat, and, at nineteen, down the Erie Canal on a canalboat. He was rich by the time he was twenty-one, poor at thirty-one, then rich again at forty-one. He may have had a secret marriage and almost certainly had a son he pretended was his nephew. His brother John committed an infamous murder that could have been lifted straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story—though in fact it went the other way; Poe lifted a story from it—and while John was waiting to be hanged in New York City, Sam invented a method of blowing up ships in the harbor with underwater electrified cables. In 1849, he visited the palace of St. Cloud near Paris and the Dolmabahçe Palace in Constantinople. In 1851, he went to the Crystal Palace in London (not really a palace, but enchanting nonetheless), and in 1854 to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. In 1855, he built his own palace, Armsmear, on a hill above his personal empire, called Coltsville, in Connecticut. Coltsville included homes for workers, churches, a music hall and library, schools, a dairy farm, a deer park, greenhouses fragrant with flowers and fruits in all seasons, a beer garden (for German employees), and, at the center of it all, the most advanced factory in the world. While Colt did not single-handedly develop the so-called American System of mass production—using machines to make uniform and interchangeable parts—he was a pioneer of the technological revolution of the 1850s that had nearly as much impact on the world as the American political revolution of the 1770s.

The life of Sam Colt is a tale that embraces many events and facets of American history in the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. But it is also—trigger warning—the story of a gun.

The broad thesis of this book is that we cannot make sense of the United States in the nineteenth century, or the twenty-first for that matter, without taking into account Colt and his revolver. Combined in the flesh of the one and the steel of the other were the forces that shaped what the country became: an industrial powerhouse rising in the east, a violent frontier expanding to the west. In no American object did these two forces of economic and demographic change converge as dynamically and completely as in Colt’s revolver. Compared to other great innovations of the era, such as Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber, and Samuel Morse’s telegraph—in which Colt played a small but significant part—Colt’s gun, a few pounds in the hand, was a featherweight. But it did as much as, if not more than, those others to make the world that was coming.

II

Before we can understand the significance of Colt’s revolvers, we need to know what guns were before he came along. The first firearms, in the thirteenth century, were simple barrels or tubes of metal (though the Chinese may have used bamboo) filled with combustible powder and a projectile. When the powder was lit, it exploded in a high-pressure burst of gases—nitrogen and carbon dioxide—that forced the projectile out of the barrel and into flight. Besides perfecting the recipe for gunpowder, the earliest gun innovators focused on barrels and stocks, making guns safer and easier to hold and aim. They then turned their attention to the mechanism, called the lock, which ignited the gunpowder. Originally, a shooter simply held a burning ember to a hole near the back of the barrel. The so-called matchlock added a serpentine, or finger lever, that lowered a burning wick to the powder. That lever evolved into a trigger, and the firing mechanism evolved into the wheel lock and the more enduring flintlock, both of which created sparks from friction and dispensed with the inconvenience of keeping a lit match on hand. In 1807, seven years before Colt’s birth, a Scottish clergyman named Alexander John Forsyth devised an important improvement called the caplock or percussion lock: a small self-enclosed capsule or “pill” of mercury fulminate ignited when sharply hit by the spring-loaded hammer of the gun.

Attempts to increase “celerity of fire,” the rate at which projectiles could be discharged from a gun, went back nearly as far as guns themselves. A number of methods had been tried. One obvious solution was to add barrels to the gun—two barrels, four barrels, even six or more, bundled in a sheaf, laid side by side like organ pipes, or fanned out like the toes of a duck. Leonardo da Vinci conceived (though does not seem to have ever built) a giant duck-footed gun with ten splayed barrels. In 1718, James Puckle took a significant leap when he invented a large gun on a tripod with a single barrel and a revolving centerpiece with numerous chambers, but Puckle’s gun never advanced beyond the prototype stage. Other attempts to use revolving cylinders had been made over the years. Colt later swore that he knew of none of them until after he invented his own. He may have been lying, as many of his rivals suggested, but his claim is not implausible. All these earlier guns were ultimately discarded and forgotten. They were too unwieldy, too heavy, too complicated, too impractical.

In short, while firearms were easier to use and more dependable at...