Colt Sells First Revolver: Mass-Produced Firepower

Samuel Colt had already failed twice. His first firearms company, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, went bankrupt in 1842 after the United States Army passed on his revolving pistol. His second venture, selling waterproof telegraph cable, barely kept him solvent. The revolver appeared to be a dead invention until a letter arrived from the Texas frontier that changed everything. Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers had been using Paterson Colts in combat against Comanche warriors and wrote to Colt with specific battlefield requirements: a revolver that could fire six shots without reloading, with enough stopping power to drop a horse, and durable enough to survive the abuse of mounted combat. Walker had learned through brutal experience that single-shot pistols left riders defenseless during the reload. A Comanche warrior could loose a dozen arrows in the time it took to reload a standard pistol. Colt built the gun Walker described. The Walker Colt weighed four and a half pounds, fired a .44 caliber ball, and was the most powerful handgun the nineteenth century would produce. On January 4, 1847, the United States government ordered 1,000 units at $28 each for use in the Mexican-American War. The contract saved Colt''s business and launched an industrial empire. Colt had no factory, so he contracted with Eli Whitney Jr. in New Haven to manufacture the first batch. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, Colt''s factory in Hartford, Connecticut, was the largest private arms manufacturer in the world, producing revolvers using interchangeable parts and assembly-line techniques that anticipated Henry Ford by half a century. Captain Walker never saw the impact of his collaboration. He was killed by a Mexican lance at the Battle of Huamantla in October 1847, eight months before the revolvers he helped design reached the troops who needed them.