The Dawn of Innovation (38 page)

While the public was impressed with the sailing race, a portion of the British cognoscenti had become extremely interested in American gun manufacturing methods, which they often referred to as the “American system of manufacturing,” by which they meant manufacturing to an idealized model, with special-purpose machinery, to such a level of precision that parts could be freely interchanged between weapons without loss of performance. And it was Sam Colt who, deservedly, most captured their imagination.

Inventors had tried their hand at making repeating firearms for centuries. Colt spent a great deal of money and invested some three decades of his life to the challenge, and when he came up with a viable solution, he displayed true marketing genius in making it a reality. His correspondence shows that he had a good grasp of manufacturing processes, but the man who turned the Colt pistol into a triumph of mass production was Elisha King Root.

Elisha Root was a Massachusetts farm boy who went to work in a cotton mill at age ten or twelve. He then apprenticed as a machinist and in 1832, at age twenty-four, was hired as a journeyman lathe hand by the axe maker Collins & Company at Collinsville, a new postal subdistrict in Canton, Connecticut. After just a few months on the job, he was given a two-year contract to build and repair machinery at a wage 75 percent higher
than that of the average skilled worker. Sam Collins, the company's primary owner and manager, had a nose for talent.
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The axe was a critical tool for the land clearing that enabled the spread of American agriculture. The intensive employment of axes since the first American settlements had evolved the world's most efficient axe, with head weighting and balance that greatly reduced strain on the woodsman. In the early nineteenth century, axes were usually made by local smiths. Sam Collins started his company in 1826 on the bet that a superb factory-produced axe would command an enormous market. (Axe makers made only the axe head; local distributors procured and fit the handles.)

Collins was right. Although he was financially overextended from time to time, when Root joined the company it was already the largest and fastest growing American axe maker. Collins may also have had the ideal businessman's temperament—even-tempered but running a tight ship, possessed of a fine sense of strategy and organization but staying close to the shop floor—and his axes quickly earned a reputation for quality.

The Collinsville plant used traditional methods: a hot skelp, or iron bar, was flattened with a trip-hammer and folded around a set of pins to form the eye, where the handle was inserted. A second bar piece, the plate, was welded into the space between the two ends of the fold, and the whole piece hammered, filed, and ground into the proper axe-head shape. The cutting edge, or bit, was made of high-grade steel—it still had to be imported from England—that was welded into a V-shaped seating on the business side of the head. That was followed by multiple tempering, grinding, polishing, and other finishing steps before shipping.
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Collins was constantly pushing for manufacturing improvements and maintained a cadre of first-class creative mechanics to that end, although Root outshone them all. By the time he left the company to take over the design and construction of Colt's new Hartford factory in 1849, he had created and fine-tuned a nearly completely mechanized production system that enabled Collins to become a true global supplier.

Root's most important patent, filed in 1838, was a fundamental change. Instead of folding the skelp around pins, he invented a machine that punched an eye through a solid block of hot iron. That gave the head far
more structural integrity than the folding and welding method.
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He followed that invention with a number of others to mechanize the finishing process—shaving and shaping machines, mass tempering on revolving racks, and consolidating operational steps to reduce machining stations.

Rather than introduce the inventions piecemeal, which would have unbalanced the production lines, Collins waited until Root's entire line of machinery was sufficiently proven, then converted the whole company in one swoop, by elevating Root to the superintendency of the shops and building a new plant to accommodate the new mechanized system.

Root's new building was up and running by 1847. An 1859
Scientific American
article reports a machine array right from Root's patent book, although greatly multiplied—there were twenty-six shaving machines, for instance. Root's achievement was widely recognized by aficionados, and job offers had been coming his way for years. He always refused them. Root was well paid, lived modestly, and enjoyed the luxury of a boss who was willing to take major financial and production risks to put his ideas into action. His own building, designed from scratch, was worth more than the pay offers he was receiving.

But when the plant was up and in full production, the equation changed. Sam Colt had tried to hire Root years before but had been turned down.
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In 1849 he was back, planning a major new plant in Hartford, anxious to bag Root as the plant designer and manager, and willing to let him name his price. Sam Collins, who greatly admired Root, proved himself a true friend by telling him that he should jump at the chance.

Samuel Colt was born in straitened circumstances but far from the poverty that he liked to allege. The Colts were one of the oldest of New England
families, with many successful merchants and entrepreneurs in the family tree, and the men had a knack for marrying into rich families—the Olivers, the Lymans, the Caldwells. Colts made fortunes supplying American and French troops in the Revolutionary War and were original partners with Alexander Hamilton in his Society for Useful Manufactures, a proto-industrial park in Paterson, New Jersey. At Paterson, the Colts were pioneers in developing and leasing water rights years before the directors at Lowell adopted the strategy.
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The family also had a streak of instability, and its financial annals are littered with bankruptcies. After the Paterson venture failed, Sam Colt's uncle Roswell, a master promoter, fund raiser, lobbyist, and string puller, bought a controlling position and used it as the base for his ventures, most of them disreputable. Huge volumes of money ran through his fingers, much of it diverted to lavish homes and entertainments or misappropriated to support his private ventures.

But the most lurid family highlight was provided by Sam's brother John in 1842. He killed a colleague with an axe in a dispute over money, then chopped up the cadaver and attempted to ship it to New Orleans. When the ship was delayed, odor betrayed the corpse, and John was arrested and convicted in a sensational New York trial. The grisly details drew tabloid interest throughout the country, which only increased with the revelation of a triangle with a woman, who had become pregnant to boot. John died in his cell before he was hanged, possibly a suicide. Sam paid for the legal defense but also managed to work in pistol demonstrations during the course of the trial.
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In 1829, when Sam was fifteen, he had been sent to Amherst Academy but was quickly expelled for pranks and for allegedly setting off an explosion. He then went to sea, as the story has it, where he conceived of the idea for a repeating firearm. (All such stories of Colt's early years must be taken lightly, for they usually originate with Colt, an inveterate tale spinner.) In any event, by the time he was seventeen, Sam was actively canvassing his firearm ideas, borrowing from his uncle Roswell and his financially pressed father to finance prototypes. An alliance with a Baltimore gunsmith, John Pearson, produced some beautiful sample guns, most of
them long guns. Colt, typically, stiffed Pearson on his invoices, and for the rest of his life, Pearson justifiably insisted that the original Colt guns were his design.

Colt was a natural showman. Whenever he was really desperate for money, he transformed into Dr. Coult, traveling the boondocks giving natural science lectures and demonstrations of laughing gas and explosives. One wishes that Frances Trollope had still been in Cincinnati to give us a portrait of the youthful Dr. Coult when he did a turn at her “Inferno” show.

Colt acquired patents on his revolvers in both Great Britain and the United States, and in 1836, with the help of Roswell, he incorporated the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, raised capital, and, like his uncle, proceeded to run through enormous amounts of money. Colt mostly concentrated on sales and was constantly on the road, spending lavishly as he chased down state militias and wooed federal military brass. (Just his tailoring bills are astonishing.) He did get promising sales interest from Latin American governments and sold several thousand guns to the Texan independence forces and to Americans troops fighting Florida's Seminole wars. The factory was under the supervision of Pliny Lawton, a respected mechanic recommended by Colt's father who got a decent production line up and running. But the company was always at the financial edge in part because of Colt's spending. It was probably doomed by the 1837 financial crash, but it was already in turmoil because of a serious split between Colt and his investors. The business was insolvent by 1841 and shut down the next year.
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The breakup with the investors may have had less to do with money than the fact that Colt still couldn't produce reliable firearms.
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The
weapons he was flogging in the 1830s may have been more dangerous to the user than to the target—which testified less to Colt's incapacities than to the gnarliness of the challenge. For a century or more, the world's most talented gunsmiths had been making runs at making repeating weapons without much success. Colt was not the first to try the revolving cylinder; all ran aground on the problem of multiple cylinders firing at once. Colt's early revolvers were loaded much as muskets were: the gunman used a tool to remove the cylinder and pushed powder and ball into each chamber; ignition was by a percussion cap. If loose powder leaked around the cylinder, chambers could ignite indiscriminately, which could cause the weapons to explode. In early Colt models the chambers were open in the rear and would occasionally fire backward.

But Colt worked through it, which may be the most surprising part of his story. One half of Sam Colt was the buncoing fabulist, the walking bonfire of other people's money, the drinker and carouser; the other half was a truly gifted inventor, not so much a mechanic as a man of fine mechanical intuitions, diligent and perseverant in pursuit of his objectives. An 1839 patent showed major strides on all fronts—preventing ignition contamination, simplifying the handling of the percussion caps, significantly reducing the part count.
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Those were the kind of micro-modifications that require long periods of experimentation and testing, and at the time, Colt was about the only person working on the problem. (Lawton executed Colt's ideas in hardware, but there is no suggestion that he played a significant role in designing them, as Elisha Root later did. At one point, Lawton requested Colt to return a sample of a newly designed pistol so he could see how to make it.
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) The combination of patient midnight-oil tinkerer with raucous huckster and con man is almost oxymoronic.

When his Paterson venture shut down, Colt removed to New York City, an ideal stage for his multiple talents. For six years, he lived in high style, if always from hand to mouth, spewing out a string of inventions. He developed a system of mines detonated by telegraphic signals to augment coastal defenses. The idea won military financing, allowing Colt to blow up giant ships in New York Harbor and the Potomac to the cheers
of thousands-strong crowds. But it was peacetime, and the military wasn't in a spending mood. He patented waterproof cartridges and actually made some money on them, and he started a telegraph company. Colt also stayed active in New York's scientific societies, worked hard on a self-education in chemistry and physics, won a number of awards, and made a host of useful contacts, like Samuel F. B. Morse.

The 1846 war with Mexico brought both opportunity and allies. The war was a chapter in the American drive to push its western border to the Pacific and was triggered by the agreement to annex the newly independent Texas as a state. The Texans who had fought for independence loved Colt's pistols and had passed them on to the newly organized Texas Rangers. An encounter in which a small force of Rangers with Colts decimated a much larger, conventionally armed band of mounted Comanches was already legendary. The famous Ranger captain Sam Walker insisted on Colts for his men in the new war. The actual sales were modest—only about 1,000—but it was still splendid publicity. Walker participated in the design, and the new pistol emerged as a saddle-carried weapon, one of the heaviest and most powerful Colts ever made.

It took all Colt could do to deliver on them. He had no time to build a factory, and his old financial network was in tatters, but after a frenzy of money scrounging, he put together a production consortium. Some parts—apparently barrels, chambers, and brass parts—were outsourced, with the rest of the manufacturing and finishing performed by Eli Whitney Jr. in New Haven. In the meantime, Colt returned to Hartford and raised money for his own factory on Pearl Street near the banks of the Connecticut River, which opened in the fall of 1847. From that point, the handguns were the stars of Colt's product line. They were ideal for close combat after cavalry charges, for ship boardings, and for countering the close-quarter tactics of Native Americans or of the “Kaffirs” bent on complicating Great Britain's imperial ambitions.

The year 1849 was a banner one for Colt. Intense lobbying and barefaced bribery finally secured a patent extension. It was also the year of the California gold strike, and the beginnings of a vast population movement
to the West and Southwest, where guns were almost workaday tools. For the first time, Colt was in position to catch a very tall wave, and he made the most of it. In that same year, he produced the most successful single product of his lifetime: the 1849 .31 caliber pocket pistol, which eventually sold 325,000 units. It is a measure of how well he understood his business, and his own limitations, that he put on such an all-court press to nail down Root.