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Founded by Samuel Colt in 1855, in Hartford.1
1830s–1850s
Samuel Colt received a British patent on his improved design for a revolver in 1835, and two U.S. patents in 1836, one on February 25 (later numbered U.S. Patent 9430X) and another on August 29 (U.S. patent 1,304). That same year, he founded his first corporation for its manufacture, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey, Colt's Patent. The first firearm manufactured at the new Paterson plant, however, was the Colt First Model Ring Lever rifle beginning in 1837. This was followed shortly thereafter in late 1837 by the introduction of the Colt Paterson. This corporation suffered quality problems in production. Making firearms with interchangeable parts was still rather new (it had reached commercial viability only about a decade before), and it was not yet easy to replicate across different factories. Interchangeability was not complete in the Paterson works, and traditional gunsmithing techniques did not fill the gap entirely there. The Colt Paterson revolver found patchy success and failure; some worked well, while others had problems. The United States Marine Corps and United States Army reported quality problems with these earliest Colt revolvers. Production had ended at the New Jersey corporation by 1842.
Colt made another attempt at revolver production in 1846 and submitted a prototype to the US government. During the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), this prototype was seen by Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker who made some suggestions to Colt about making it in a larger caliber. Having no factory or machinery to produce the pistols, Samuel Colt collaborated with the Whitney armory of Whitneyville, Connecticut. This armory was run by the family of Eli Whitney. Eli Whitney Jr (born 1820), the son of the cotton-gin-developer patriarch, was the head of the family armory and a successful arms maker and innovator of the era. Colt used a combination of renting the Whitney firm's facilities and subcontracting parts to the firm to continue his pursuit of revolver manufacture.
Colt's new revolvers found favor with Texan volunteers (the progenitors of later Texas Rangers cavalry groups), and they placed an order for 1,000 revolvers that became known as the Colt Walker, ensuring Colt's continuance in manufacturing revolvers. In 1848, Colt was able to start again with a new business of his own, and 1855, he converted it into a corporation under the name of Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut.
Colt purchased a large tract of land beside the Connecticut River, where he built his first factory in 1848, a larger factory called the Colt Armory in 1855, a manor that he called Armsmear in 1856, and employee tenement housing. He established a ten-hour day for employees, installed washing stations in the factory, mandated a one-hour lunch break, and built the Charter Oak Hall, a club where employees could enjoy games, newspapers, and discussion rooms. Colt ran his plant with a military-like discipline, he would fire workers for tardiness, sub-par work or even suggesting improvements to his designs.
In an attempt to attract skilled German workers to his plant, Colt built a village near the factory away from the tenements which he named Coltsville and modeled the homes after a village near Potsdam. In an effort to stem the flooding from the river he planted German osiers, a type of willow tree in a 2-mile long dike. He subsequently built a factory to manufacture wicker furniture made from these trees.
The 1850s were a decade of phenomenal success for the new Colt corporation. Colt was the first to widely commercialize the total use of interchangeable parts throughout a product. It was a leader in assembly line practice. It was a major innovator and training ground in manufacturing technology in this decade (and several after). Soon after establishing his Hartford factory, Colt set out to establish a factory in Europe and chose London, England. He organized a large display of his firearms at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Hyde Park, London and ingratiated himself by presenting cased engraved Colt revolvers to such appropriate officials as Britain's Master General of the Ordnance. At one exhibit Colt disassembled ten guns and reassembled ten guns using different parts from different guns. As the world's leading proponent of mass production techniques, Colt went on to deliver a lecture on the subject to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. The membership rewarded his efforts by awarding him the Telford Gold Medal.
Colt's presence in the British market caused years of acrimony and lawsuits among British arms makers, who doubted the validity of Colt's British patent and the desirability of the American system of manufacturing. It took many more years and a UK government commission before the point became universally accepted that such manufacture was possible and economical. Colt opened his London plant on the River Thames at Pimlico and began production on January 1, 1853. Many English people saw Colt's advanced steam-powered machinery as proof of America's growing position as a leader in modern industrial production. On a tour of the factory, Charles Dickens was so impressed with the facilities that he recorded his favorable comments of Colt's revolvers in an 1854 edition of Household Words. Most significant, the Colt factory's machines mass-produced interchangeable parts that could be easily and cheaply put together on assembly lines using standardized patterns and gauges by unskilled labor as opposed to England's top gunmakers.
In 1854 the British Admiralty ordered 4,000 Navy Model Colt revolvers. In 1855 the British Army placed an order for 5,000 of these revolvers for army issue. Despite a following order later in the year for an additional 9,000 revolvers, Colt failed to convince the British to adopt his revolver as the issue sidearm for the army. Colt began to realize that British sales were failing to meet his expectations. Unable to justify the London factory's expenses, Colt closed the London factory in 1856. Over the next few months his workmen crated and shipped the machinery and disassembled firearms back to America.
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Though the U.S. was not directly involved in the Crimean War (1854–1856), Colt's weapons were used by both sides. In 1855 Colt unveiled new state-of-the-art armories in the Hartford and London factories stocked with the latest machine tools (some of which were of Colt's devising), many built by Francis A. Pratt and Amos Whitney, who would found the original Pratt & Whitney tool building firm a few years later. For example, the Lincoln miller debuted to industry at these armories.
Colt had set up libraries and educational programs within the plants for his employees. Colt's armories in Hartford were seminal training grounds for several generations of toolmakers and other machinists, who had great influence in other manufacturing efforts of the next half century. Prominent examples included F. Pratt and A. Whitney (as mentioned above); Henry Leland (who would end up at Cadillac and Lincoln); Edward Bullard Sr of the Bullard firm; and, through Pratt & Whitney, Worcester R. Warner and Ambrose Swasey (of Warner & Swasey).
In 1852 an employee of Colt's, Rollin White, came up with the idea of having the revolver cylinder bored through to accept metallic cartridges. He took this idea to Colt who flatly rejected it and ended up firing White within a few years. Colt historian RL Wilson has described this as the major blunder of Sam Colt's professional life. Rollin White left Colt's in December 1854 and registered a patent on April 3, 1855, in Hartford, Connecticut, as patent number 12,648: Improvement in Repeating Fire-arms. On November 17, 1856, White signed an agreement with Smith & Wesson for the exclusive use of his patent. The contract stipulated that White would be paid 25 cents for every revolver, but that it was up to him to defend his patent against infringement as opposed to Smith & Wesson.
During the 1850s and 1860s, Rollin White had been permanently trying to keep control on his breech-loading system patent, bringing a lawsuit to any breech-loaded manufactured gun. He nevertheless obtained an advance against royalties for using his patent from Smith & Wesson, a company that not only introduced its first revolver in 1857 (Smith & Wesson Model 1, a rear-loader) but also started, as of 1858, to convert cap & ball percussion guns into rear-loaders, even with formerly Colt manufactured revolvers. But the Colt's company itself was prevented by American laws from infringing the Rollin White patent and all along the 1850s and 1860s continued manufacturing percussion guns. In 1860 it produced a new revolver model for the United States Army. This Colt Army Model 1860 appeared just in time for the American Civil War.
1860–1865: American Civil War
The New York Daily Tribune denounced Colt and his company by asserting, “the traitors have found sympathizers among us, men base enough to sell arms when they knew they would be... in the hands of the deadly enemies of the Union... Col. Colt’s manufactory can turn probably 1,000 a week and has been doing so for the past four months for the South.” This article even chided the Federal Government for not taking action against Colt: “Every man who makes arms should be watched, and if he will not work for a fair equivalent for the Government, his manufactory should be taken away from him.” Despite secession and growing tensions between the North and the South, “Colt’s sales to Alabama, Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi in 1860 alone were at least $61,000 (today’s equivalent of about 3.35 million).” Until just days before the first shot at Fort Sumter, Colt received orders from various states, some participating in secession. In his memoir on Colt, written in 1866, Henry Barnard reported, “before the rebellion broke out, Col. Colt, foreseeing that his weapons must ere long be in double demand, had made all preparations to extend his factory.”
The American Civil War was a boon to firearms manufacturers such as Colt's, and the company thrived during the conflict. Sam Colt had carefully developed contacts within the ordnance department, signing the very first government contract for 25,000 rifles. Colt's Factory was described as "an industrial palace topped by a blue dome", powered by a 250-horsepower steam engine. During the American Civil War, Colt had 1,500 employees who produced 150,000 muskets and pistols a year. In 1861 and 1863, the company sold 107,000 of the Colt Army Model 1860 alone, with production reaching 200,500 by the end of the war in 1865.
During the war, Colt's was still prevented by the American laws from infringing Rollin White's patent. Nevertheless, the war made a huge fortune for the company, allowing Sam Colt to become America's first manufacturing tycoon, though he did not live to see the end of the war; he died of rheumatic fever on January 10, 1862. His close friend and firearms engineer, Elisha K. Root, took over as Colt's company president. On February 4, 1864, a fire destroyed most of the factory, including arms, machinery, plans, and factory records. On September 1, 1865, Root died, leaving the company in the hands of Samuel Colt's brother-in-law, Richard Jarvis. The company's vice-president was William B. Franklin, who had recently left the Army at the end of the Civil War. With the Civil War over and having no new military contracts, Colt's Manufacturing was forced to lay off over 800 employees.
The company found itself in a precarious situation. The original revolver patents had expired, allowing other companies to produce copies of his designs. Additionally, metallic cartridge revolvers were gaining in popularity, but Colt could not produce any because of the Rollin White patent held by rival Smith & Wesson. Likewise, Colt had been so protective of its own patents that other companies had been unable to make revolvers similar to their design. As the Rollin White patent neared expiration, Colt moved to develop its own metallic cartridge revolver.
1865–1880s: Post–Civil War
It was 1868 when Colt's first effort toward a metallic cartridge revolver was by conversion of existing percussion revolvers. The first of these conversions was patented on September 15, 1868, by Colt engineer, F. Alexander Thuer as patent number 82258. The Thuer conversion was made by milling off the rear of the receiver and replacing it with a breechplate containing six internal firing pins. The cartridges were loaded through the mouths of the chambers. Colt made 5000 of these but they were not well accepted. Colt found the mechanism so complex it included a spare percussion cylinder with each revolver.
Colt tasked its superintendent of engineering, Charles Richards, to come up with a solution. The Richards conversion was performed on the Colt 1860 Army revolver. The caliber was.44 Colt and the loading lever was replaced by an ejector rod. This conversion added a breech plate with a firing pin and a rear sight mounted on the breechplate. Cartridges were loaded into the cylinder one at a time via a loading gate. Colt manufactured 9000 of these revolvers between 1873 and 1878. In 1873, Colt performed the same conversion on the M1851 and M1861 revolvers for the US Navy in.38 rimfire. Another of Colt's engineers, William Mason, improved this conversion by placing the rear sight on the hammer and, along with Richards, he was granted patents in 1871 to convert percussion revolvers into rear-loading metallic-cartridge revolvers. Those converted revolvers are identified as the "Richards-Mason conversion". There were approximately 2100 Richards-Mason M1860 Army conversions made from 1877 to 1878 in a serial-number range 5800 to 7900.
In November 1865, Franklin had attempted to purchase a license to the Rollin White patent from competitor Smith & Wesson. White and Smith & Wesson would take no less than $1.1 million, but Franklin and Colt's directors decided it was too large an investment on a patent that would expire in 1868. In the meantime, Colt turned its attention to manufacturing goods other than firearms, such as watches, sewing machines, typewriters and bicycles. In 1868 Rollin White requested an extension to his patent, but the request was rejected. He then turned to the Congress, but the request was again rejected, this time by the Senate and on the initiative of President Ulysses Grant, in January 1870. This led the patent to expire, allowing competitors to develop their own breech-loading guns and metallic cartridges. Following this, on that same year of 1870, Colt's bought the National Arms Company, a Brooklyn, New York company known for manufacturing derringers and for circumventing the Rollin White patent by utilizing a unique cartridge. Colt continued to produce the.41 Short derringer after the acquisition, as an effort to help break into the metallic-cartridge gun market, but also introduced its own three Colt Derringer Models, all of them also chambered in a.41 rimfire unique cartridge. The last model to be in production, the third Colt Derringer, was not dropped until 1912. The first metallic cartridge breech-loading weapons sold by Colt's were those Derringers, in 1870, that were formerly conceived by the National Arms Company, but Colt's also started developing its own rear-loading guns and cartridges.
In 1871, Colt's introduced its first revolver models using rear-loaded metallic cartridges: the.41 caliber Colt House Revolver (also known as the Cloverleaf for its four-round cylinder configuration) and the.22 cal Colt Open Top Pocket Model Revolver. However, Colt's wanted a more powerful practical handgun loaded with metallic cartridges so the company put forward William Mason, who in 1871 began work on Colt's first.44 caliber metallic-cartridge revolver: the Colt Model 1871-72 Open Top. The company registered two patents for the Open Top, one in 1871, the other in 1872, the same patents mentioned in the markings of Colt Single Action Army revolvers, a nowadays legendary and long produced model, improved and based on the Open Top. Production of the Open Top started in 1872 and stopped in 1873 when the Single Action Army model started to be delivered to the US Army. However, the Open Top was already a completely new design. The parts, for example, would not interchange with the older percussion pistols. Mason moved the rear sight to the rear of the barrel as opposed to the hammer or the breechblock of the earlier efforts. The caliber was.44 rimfire and it was submitted to the US Army for testing in 1872. The Army rejected the pistol and asked for a more powerful caliber with a stronger frame. Mason redesigned the frame to incorporate a topstrap, similar to the Remington revolvers, and placed the rear sight on the rear of the frame; he consulted with Richards on some other improvements. The first prototype of the new gun was still chambered in.44 rimfire, but the first model was in the newest caliber known as the.45 Colt.
The revolver was chosen by the Army in 1872, with the first order, for 8000 revolvers, shipping in the summer of 1873: The Colt Single Action Army or "Peacemaker", also known as the Colt Model 1873, was born. This revolver was one of the most prevalent firearms in the American West during the end of the 19th century and Colt still produces it, in six different calibers, two finishes and three barrel lengths.
In the new market of metallic cartridge rear-loading pocket revolvers, Colt's not only introduced its three Derringer Models (as of 1870) or the Colt House and the Open Top Pocket (the last two as of 1871) but also introduced in 1873 a subsequent design called its "New Line" revolver models, based on William Mason's patents.
After the success of the Colt Single Action Army and Colt's conversion of existing percussion revolvers to Richards-Mason conversions, Mason went on to design Colt's first Double-action revolver, the Colt M1877. Following this, he once again teamed up with Richards to produce a larger-framed version, the Colt M1878 Frontier. It was Colt's first large-frame, double-action revolver. It combined the front end of the Single Action Army revolver with a double-action, 6-shot frame mechanism. It was available commercially in numerous calibers.
The 1870s and 1880s provided sales opportunity to the Colt company via the spread of European-American society ever further westward across the continent, and the demand for firearms that it engendered in various ways. As white Americans displaced Indians from the Indian Territory, both sides were eager for firearms. On the white side, both the U.S. Army and civilians were customers of Colt. The Army carried Colt revolvers through the last of its Indian Wars. On the Indian side, Colt weapons were captured when possible, or bought from whoever was selling. Even among whites in towns where Indians had been vanquished, a thriving demand for guns existed, from the criminals to the police to self-defending civilians. Memoirs of Americans including Walter Chrysler and Jack Black speak of what it was like growing up in Western towns where most people had guns and open carry was common (such as in Kansas and Missouri, which were considered "out West" at the time—now considered the Old West).
From Wikipedia’s article on Colt's Manufacturing Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4