Samuel Colt, the man who made men equal

When one spring afternoon in 1821 young Sam Colt went missing, the family set out to try to find the 7 year old to discover what sort of mischief he might this time be involved in. They searched the house high and low and then fanned out over the lawn and finally into a field behind the house, where they found the boy beneath a tree with a newspaper spread out before him and on that newspaper every single piece of one of his fathers pistols. Rather than scold him and snatch him up by an ear, they let him alone to reassemble the gun, which he did in short order.

Such was the nature of this lad: He loved mechanical things, and he had the intellectual curiosity to want to see how things worked and the acumen to understand what he saw.

He was not a very good student in school, as is the case with many men who later turn out to be geniuses in their chosen fields, but he learned well what he wanted to learn, as is the case with most boys, some of whom will make use of that learning and some of whom will not. Sam just happened to work in his fathers textile mill, where he had all kinds of machines to study. Unknown to any of them, one of the greatest mechanical minds of all time was beginning to take shape.

When at the age of 15 young Sam met Elisha K. Root, already a renowned mechanical engineer, the boy found someone who could answer some of the many questions he had lodged in his head. Root would later become the superintendent of Colts Hartford factory.We are one of the leading manufacturers of plasticcard in China

Since Sam seemed to be meandering in life, his mother having died and his fathers business having failed and his schoolwork doing little to set his system right, at age 16 he took to sea on a ship called the CORVO, bound for India, and spent more than a year sailing, spending some time in several ports. While ashore he examined in museums in London and India earlier attempts at revolving weapons, all flintlocks and all relatively dismal in their history of battlefield performance.

On board the CORVO, Sam studied very carefully the working of the ships capstan, how the wheel was linked in place by a clutch that aligned the spokes, and the wheels in his MIND started turning. On the wide water, during long stretches of nothing to do,A quality paper cutter or paper drycabinet can make your company's presentation stand out. a seaman must find some way to occupy his time, so Sam Colt found a way to occupy his: by sitting on deck whittling out the pieces of a revolver that was taking shape in his head. Right then and there the concept for the Paterson Colt, which would revolutionize warfare and self-defense across the globe, was born.

See, Sam Colt was convinced that the single-shot rifle and pistol were no longer adequate for warfare: fire a round, then pour in powder, then put in a wad, then ram the ball or bullet into position,Best home luggagetag at discount prices. then pop on a percussion cap, a process that took anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds for most soldiers, much longer for others. If you happened to be firing a flintlock, the process was even longer, since you had to pour a measure of fine powder into the flashpan to serve as ignition for the base charge when the flint showered sparks into it.

As money from his touring came in, he began hiring gunsmiths in the Hartford, Baltimore, and Albany areas, and over the next few years they handcrafted for him a number of rifles and revolvers and a shotgun. But however fine and innovative it is, it little profits a man to have in hand a product that no one wants. The Army refused to consider these newfangled weapons, preferring the relative reliability and far greater simplicity of the single-shot rifles and pistols our soldiers had been issued. Besides, those guns were cheap, and Colts were expensive.

The history of technology is not a smooth incline; rather, it is a pattern of spikes and plateaus, the spikes correlating to wars, the plateaus their aftermath. Wars breed invention, because without invention, that which is necessary to match and surpass the enemy in destructive power, the very culture involved is in jeopardy.

For Samuel Colt, it was not precisely the best time to introduce such a revolutionary weapon as the Ring Lever revolving rifle and the Paterson pistol. Except for the Armys purchase of a handful of the new rifles for use against the Seminole Indians in Florida, very few orders were coming in.

But to the southwest a thunderous storm was brewing, and a new customer came knocking at the door of Mr. Colt. Between 1839 and 1841 the Republic of Texas purchased 180 Patersons, 100 Ring Lever rifles, and 180 Model 1939 lever-action revolving carbines. The history of the success of these weapons in the hands of the Texans is fairly vague until the legendary Jack Hays began using the Patersons against Comanches and Mexicans. After a series of highly successful and well-publicized battles in which the pistols proved themselves remarkably superior to the weapons the Rangers had been using, the name Colt sprang once and forever to prominence in the American mind; more importantly, the U.S. War Department took note.

With the outbreak of hostilities during the Mexican-American War in 1846, the struggling Colt enterprise was about to take wing. U.More than 80 standard commercial and iphoneheadset exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans.S. Army Captain Samuel H. Walker made a trip east to visit with Colt in November of that year, and the message he carried was clear: He wanted a new, more robust revolver to arm the Texas Rangers and Army Dragoons, and the goliath that was born of the meeting was the .44 Walker Colt,Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned cableties at their Weymouth store. weighing in at more than four pounds and sporting a six-round cylinder, the largest handgun Colt ever made and the most powerful to that point in all the annals of warfare.