Transcript
Introduction
"Sam Colt embodied the America of his time. He was big, brash, voracious, imaginative, and possessed extraordinary drive and energy. He was a classic disruptor, who not only invented a world-changing product, but produced it and sold it in world-changing ways. He became the prototype for hundreds of such disruptors to come, from Thomas Edison to Henry Ford, to Thomas Watson to Steve Jobs. Friends admired him for his generosity, his warmth, and his boldness. Adversaries reviled him for his dishonesty and his rapaciousness. He possessed all of these qualities. But above all, he was relentless because he was a man with his own distasteful truths and airs willing to hide them. Colt left behind rabbit holes, ellipses, traps for his future biographies. The missing pages of a journal for instance, that he kept when he was 17 that might have shed light on his experience aboard a slave ship to New Orleans or the letters of women with whom he shared his bed, which have mostly though not entirely, been Colt from his archives.
One of his brothers once accused Colt of having a wife in every port, but the exact nature of his amorous relations is mostly a matter of conjecture. Colt has not been treated seriously by historians or biographers. We tend to be more comfortable in the company of historical figures who pulled the triggers, soldiers, desperados, psychopath than those who made the guns, perhaps because the business of manufacturing and selling weapons seems less compelling and more clinical than the business of using them. I hope Sam Colt's life will, if nothing else, defy that expectation. He had solved one of the great technological challenges of the early 19th century, how to make a gun shoot multiple bullets without reloading. For more than two decades, 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 17, he began touring the country as a traveling showman.
At 18, he went up the Mississippi River in a steamboat. At 19, down the Erie Canal on a canal boat. He was rich by the time he was 21, poor at 31, then rich again at 41. 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, Sam invented a method of blowing up ships in the harbor with underwater electrified cables. And at the center of his life story is the most advanced factory in the world.
While Colt did not singlehandedly 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. Compared to other great innovations of his era, such as Cyrus McCormick's reaper, Charles Goodyear's vulcanized rubber and Samuel Morse's telegraph, Colt's gun, a few pounds in the hand was just a featherweight. But it did as much, if not more, than those others to make the world that was coming. What follows is a work of fact for better or for worse, with no agenda other than to honestly tell what happened to Sam Colt, his gun, and America in the years 1814 to 1862."
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk you about today, which is, Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America by Jim Rasenberger. So before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you how Sam Colt ties into everything that we're working on and studying on the podcast, how influential he was to future generations of entrepreneurs. So Henry Leland, who I did a podcast on a few months ago, who was the founder of Cadillac and Lincoln.