Founders
Episode 147 Sam Colt: The Six-Shooter That Changed America
Founders

Episode 147: Sam Colt: The Six-Shooter That Changed America

Founders

Episode 147

Sam Colt: The Six-Shooter That Changed America

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America by Jim Rasenberger.

[00:00:01] - 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. 

[00:01:59] - He had solved one of the great technological challenges of the early 19th century. 

[00:02:36] - He was rich at 21. Poor at 31. Then rich again at 41. 

[00:07:10] - Sam Colt solved a 400-year-old problem. The guns of 1830 were essentially what they had been in 1430.

[00:07:53] - There's a financial panic in 1819. This is a very important part in the life of Sam Colt. It may explain why he was such a hard worker, ruthless, and determined. The panic of 1819 bankrupts his family. 

[00:10:48] - What kind of person would do this voluntarily? He was set to embark on a 17,000-mile voyage across the Atlantic, around the horn of Africa, through the Indian Ocean, and to the city of Calcutta. Honeymoon was not quite the word to describe a 17,000-mile voyage to Calcutta in 1830. 

[00:13:57] - He bridled at being under any authority other than his own. His dogma was the gospel of self-determination. “It is better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion.” 

[00:14:19] - Self-determination took deep root in my heart and to has been the mark that has and shall control my destiny. 

[00:16:14] - Every cut of the jackknife an act of quiet vengeance not only against those who had flogged him but against the nameless forces that had snatched away his childhood with financial ruin and death. 

[00:19:58] - He saw a nation brimming with industry and ingenuity and hope. And at the same time, anxiety, fear, and brutality

[00:20:55] - Nights went to [selling] nitrous oxide, days to improving his gun. 

[00:22:31] - This description of the book sold me on buying it: Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it. By the time he died in 1862 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of the most famous men in nation and one of the richest.

[00:27:19] - But more important than Roswell’s money would be the contacts he helped Sam cultivate in coming months, and more important still would be the encouragement Roswell gave to the young entrepreneur. 

[00:30:46] - Why guns were the first mass-produced product in America: But the government was not in the business of sewing or telling time; it very much was in the business of preparing for war, even if there were no wars to be fought just then. As a result, guns were among the first, and by far the most important, mass-produced items in the United States. Because the government was the main buyer of guns, it dictated how the guns were made. And it had a deep interest in solving problems of gun manufacturing. 

[00:37:23] - I’m amazed at how much life Sam Colt fit into 47 short years.

[00:38:43] - One of the main takeaways of the book is Everything sucks. I’m moving forward anyways. 

[00:38:58] - His refusal to admit defeat would appear almost delusional at times. 

[00:39:34] - The paradox of Sam Colt: 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. 

[00:42:20] - If you are in a great market, the market will pull the product out of you. 

[00:48:52] - Sam Colt is extreme. This is him admonishing his younger brother for not being ambitious enough: Don’t for the sake of your own good name think again of being a subordinate. You had better blow out your brains at once & manure an honest man’s ground with your carcass than to hang your ambition on so low a peg.

[00:49:15] - The anger and frustration was real, and his desire to be his own master and master of others was sincere. 

[00:52:27] - I've spent the last 10 years of my life without profit in perfecting military inventions. How many people are willing to work this hard and not give up after a decade? 

[00:54:17] - The opening of a new market: [Sam] Walker had done a great deal for Colt in the weeks since they began exchanging letters in November. Most important, he had single-handedly persuaded the Ordnance Department to contravene its long-standing objection to Colt’s pistols. 

[00:57:40] - After his first business fails, he is determined to control his second attempt: “I am working on my own hook and have sole control and management of my business. No longer subject to the whims of a pack of dam fools styling themselves a board of directors. 

[01:07:19] - He was metabolically wired for productivity. He is, without exception, the hardest working man that I know of. 

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Sam Colt: The Six-Shooter That Changed America

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.

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