COLT, SAMUEL. 



225 



pire. This treaty was forwarded to France 

 for confirmation by the Imperial Government. 

 In December, 1862, the Anamese ro.se in insur- 

 rection, and on the 17th of that month pene- 

 trated into the interior of the fort of Saigon, 

 but were repulsed with heavy loss. On the 

 27th they attacked Mytho, but were forced to 

 retreat with 225 killed. 



COLT, SAMUEL, the inventor and manufac- 

 turer of Colt's revolver, was born at Hartford, 

 Conn., July 19, 1814, died in that city Jan. 10, 

 1862. Hi's ancestors were among the early 

 residents of Ilartford : his father was a man of 

 great energy, intelligence, and enterprise, at 

 first a inerchant, and afterward a manufacturer 

 of woollen, cotton, and silk goods. His mother 

 was a lady of superior ability and talent, the 

 daughter of Major John Caldwell, an eminent 

 banker of Ilartford. The son had the oppor- 

 tunity of acquiring a good English education in 

 the schools of his native city, but his energetic 

 and restless spirit led him, even when a child, 

 to prefer the workroom to the schoolroom. At 

 the age of ten years he entered his father's fac- 

 tory, and remained there with occasional in- 

 tervals spent on a farm and at school, till his 

 14th year, when he was sent to Amherst, Mass., 

 for the further prosecution of his studies. 

 Here, again, the restless spirit which had ani- 

 mated him from childhood, appeared ; he ran 

 away from the school, and before his friends 

 knew anything of the matter, he had, in July, 

 1 S 27. shipped as a boy before the mast, on the 

 ship Corvo, Captain Spalding. on an East India 

 voyage. From this voyage, though subjected 

 to severe hardships in its course, young Colt 

 returned, no whit subdued in spirit, enterprise, 

 or resolution. After a short apprenticeship in 

 his father's factory, at Ware. Mass.. in the dye- 

 ing and bleaching department, under the tuition 

 of Mr. William T. Smith, a scientific man and 

 highly practical chemist, where, with great 

 readiness, he familiarized himself with the 

 leading principles of chemistry, and became a 

 dexterous and skilful manipulator, he again left 

 home, to eeek his fortune. Though but 17 or 

 18 years of age, and with but a meagre educa- 

 tion, either in chemistry or anything else, yet 

 under the assumed name of Dr. Coult, he trav- 

 ersed every state, and visited almost every 

 town of 2,000 inhabitants or over, in the Union 

 and British X. America, lecturing on chemistry, 

 and, owing mainly, no doubt, to his skill and 

 success as an experimenter, drew full houses 

 almost everywhere. The profit from these lec- 

 tures, which was very considerable, during the 

 two years which followed, was not squandered, 

 as it would have been by many a youth under 

 similar circumstances, but every dollar beyond 

 his actual necessities was devoted to the prose- 

 cution of the great invention which is indis- 

 solubly connected with his name, and the germ 

 of which he had already devised while on his 

 voyage to Calcutta with Captain Spalding. 

 The first model of his pistol made in wood in 

 1829, with the imperfect tools at his command, 



VOL IL 15 



while he was a sailor boy on board the Corvo, 

 is still in existence. The money acquired by 

 his chemical lectures enabled him to manufac- 

 ture other models, which, in their practical re- 

 sults, exceeded even his own most sanguine 

 expectations, and in 1835, when only 21 years 

 of age, he took out his first patent for revolving 

 firearms. Before obtaining his patent in this 

 country he visited England and France, and 

 secured the protection of their patent laws. 

 At this time, and, indeed, for several years 

 after, he was not aware that any person before 

 himself had ever conceived the idea of a fire- 

 arm with a rotating chambered breech. On a 

 subsequent visit to Europe, while exploring 

 the collection of firearms in the Tower of Lon- 

 don and other repositories of weapons of war 

 in England and on the Continent, he found sev- 

 eral guns having the chambered breech, but 

 all were so constructed as to be of little prac- 

 tical value, being far more liable to explode 

 prematurely and destroy the man who should 

 use them than the objects at which they might 

 be aimed. Unwilling, however, to seem to 

 claim what had been previously invented, he 

 read before the Institution of Civil Engineers 

 in England (of which he was the only Ameri- 

 can associate), in 1851, an elaborate paper on 

 the subject, in which he described and illus- 

 trated, with appropriate drawings, the various 

 early inventions of revolving firearms, and de- 

 monstrated the principles on which his were 

 constructed. But to return to our narrative : 

 patents having been issued in England, France, 

 and the United States for the revolver, as it 

 was called, he succeeded, despite the croaking 

 of many of his acquaintances, in inducing some 

 Xew York capitalists to take an interest in it, 

 and a company was formed at Pater son. X. J., 

 in 1835, with a capital of $300,000, under the 

 name of the Patent Arms Company. His next 

 step was to prevail upon the U. S. Government 

 to adopt the arm. For a long time he was 

 foiled in this : the officers of the Government 

 and of the Army and Xavy frowned upon the 

 invention : they objected to the percussion cap, 

 to the supposed liability of the arm to get out 

 of order, to the tendency of several of the 

 charges to explede at the same time, and to the 

 greater difficulty of repairing it than the arms 

 in common use. These objections Mr. Colt met 

 by careful explanations, by repeated experi- 

 ments, and where improvements were possible, 

 by modifications in the construction of the 

 weapon. The company with which he was 

 connected expended about $300,000 in the 

 manufacture of the arms and in improvements 

 in them, and in the machinery for their manu- 

 facture. In 1837, during the Florida war, the 

 officers of the army were baffled in their at- 

 tempts to drive the Indians from the Everglades 

 by their skill in the use of the rifle. At length 

 a few of the troops, under the direction of Lt.- 

 Col. (afterward Gen.) Harney, were armed 

 with Colt's revolvers, and their success was 

 such that more were at once ordered, and the 



