Part 3: An Industrial Ecosystem Emerges Around Sam Colt’s Guns

Sam Colt’s pistol with a revolving cylinder, perhaps the greatest single innovation in firearms history, belongs to Connecticut despite its birth elsewhere. The gun, and the man, defined the industrial ecosystem that built up around Hartford and the rest of the Northeast during Colt’s remarkable, controversial life.

It was that ecosystem — not just guns and the factory machines and forges that made them possible, but also hardware, textiles, sewing machines, typewriters, clocks, evolving forms of insurance, public health systems and rising arts and culture — that cradled an amazing age of innovation in the mid-19th century.

And Sam Colt was at the center of it.

Colt was born and raised in Hartford and moved to Massachusetts as an adolescent. Thrown out of Amherst Academy, he whittled the first model of the revolver while traveling the world as a teenager. He built the early prototypes in Baltimore and first manufactured it in Paterson, N.J., from 1836 to 1841, using more than $200,000 from relatives — more than $5 million today.

But it was in Hartford where he won patent No. 138 in 1936, with the help of a family connection in the patent office. And it was from Hartford where Sam and his father set off to visit Simeon North’s successful gun manufactory in Middletown; the Collins Axe Co.; the national armory in Springfield; and the iron furnaces of Salisbury, supplier of the high-grade metal that fed the region’s armaments industry.

These were the hallowed sites of early-18th-century arms-making, along with Eli Whitney’s factory in Hamden, by then run by Eli Jr. After failing in Paterson, amid a bank panic and with poor quality control, Sam Colt returned to Connecticut in 1846 to start over. Colt made a .44-caliber six-shooter for the famous Capt. Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers, working in the Whitney factory.

“Even Walker, who ironically was killed bearing the arm he helped design, fell victim to Colt’s renewed pattern of broken promises,” wrote William Hosley, in “Colt: The Making of an American Legend” (1996). “Cost overruns and production delays piled up like bodies on the battlefield of Vera Cruz as Colt scurried about frantically pushing, bullying and pleading with anyone who could help to stop whatever else they had going to get behind his effort.”

Hosley described Colt approaching a “who’s who of future luminaries in the American arms trade,” including Edwin Wesson and Eliphalet Remington.

Annoying, certainly. But Colt understood the crucial point: Now that interchangeable parts were part of the landscape for clocks, guns and other goods, the next level of progress required an interwoven system of businesses feeding off each other, to build not just products but a modern industrial economy.

Gaining Steam

By 1847, Colt was back in Hartford, outfitting a factory in a leased building. He lured away the brilliant Elisha K. Root, who had reinvented forging techniques at Collins, offering a princely $5,000 a year.

That same year, Eliphalet Bulkeley moved to Hartford from East Haddam, where he had been a prominent local merchant. He took over the annuity business within Aetna Fire Insurance Co., later spinning it off as the Aetna Life Insurance Co., launching a family dynasty that would build Aetna into a powerhouse.

At Colt’s, Root devised and built one-of-a-kind machines that revolutionized manufacturing, and hired and trained some of the greatest mechanical achievers of the age: Christopher Spencer, a machine-maker at the Cheney silk mills who later invented a breech-loading rifle, and later still the machines that made metal screws; George Fairfield, who later ran the Weed sewing machine factory and founded the Hartford Screw Machine Co., both on Hartford’s Capitol Avenue; and Charles Billings, who later joined with Spencer to build the most modern forge, just off Capitol Avenue.

Colt’s pistol factory also attracted two Massachusetts mechanics, Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney. The workaholic duo later became friends at the Phoenix Iron Works, a Colt supplier, before launching a machine company called Pratt & Whitney that brought new levels of precision — giving rise to the age of aviation long after the founders died.

While Root made the place work, Colt brought in ideas and, mostly, sold himself and his firearms around the nation and the world. He would bribe journalists for fawning stories, and government officials for contracts, by offering expensive presentation guns in cases. He commissioned art for mass marketing and had himself named a colonel by the governor.

In 1853, he opened an armory in London, two years after lecturing British engineers on the revolver.

Two years later he opened the Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Co. armory with his famous Russian onion dome — but not before building a dike to hold back the adjacent Connecticut River.

Making all this possible was the rise of steam engines, which powered not only the factories but the new trains connecting New York to Hartford, Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven and Springfield.

One of the leading steam engine makers was Woodruff & Beach, a neighbor of Colt’s first Hartford factory. In 1855, the same year the Colt Armory was built, the Hartford Water Works installed a Root-designed, Woodruff-made pump system leading to a reservoir on the edge of town. The effort capped a fierce, 2-year battle between the water board, including Samuel Woodruff, and the city council, which originally voted to buy an imported engine.

That water works battle pitted Whigs against Democrats, new technology against old, and reformers against an entrenched, conflict-ridden power base. Sam Colt, naturally, exerted financial muscle to get his way.

Steam engines tended to blow up, and a year earlier one such deadly explosion had led to the founding of Hartford Hospital. In 1857, a group of Hartford men formed the Polytechnic Club to study steam engine safety. Two of them, years later, founded the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Co., with a board that included Richard Jarvis, the president of Colt’s and brother of Sam Colt’s widow, Elizabeth. Hartford Steam remains in business, now owned by a German insurer.

Whether Colt’s drove broader innovation or merely achieved success itself is a matter of debate. Some sources, including a 1930 history of the Pratt & Whitney Machine Co., as well as Hosley and other historians, see the armory as a great industrial incubator. Others are skeptical, saying men such as Fairfield and Spencer were accomplished by the time Colt employed them.

“They hired the guys at some point, but that’s where it stops,” said Dave Corrigan, curator of the Museum of Connecticut History. “The machine technology was everywhere. … There was constant movement all around the machine shops in the Northeast.”

Machining Capital

There’s no question that Colt’s — known by various company names over the years — was the first manufacturer to make complex goods with such precision and in such large volume that it could cut prices while improving quality.

And there’s no question that the 1850s saw a remarkable flowering of industrial innovation that would define Connecticut forever. In Norwich, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson joined forces to make lever action pistols and rifles with a self-contained cartridge. They took over a shop that had been run by an inventor and teacher of Wesson’s, named Charles Thurber.

Thurber had patented the first typewriter with a cylindrical platen — but never manufactured it.

Smith and Wesson failed in their Norwich venture, which was taken over by their main investor, a shirt-maker named Oliver Winchester, who moved the operation to New Haven. Winchester and Benjamin Henry turned out the breech-loading Henry rifle just in time for the Civil War. Smith and Wesson moved to Springfield, hiring a former Colt’s designer just as the Colt patent expired.

In New Britain, a homegrown hardware industry was growing fast, led by The Stanley Works and the civic and consumer-brand vision of George Landers, who saw the rising market for mass-produced household goods.

In Bristol, Waterbury and Thomaston, the clock business, as well as the hardware trade, supported the rolled brass industry. The largest clockmaker, Chauncey Jerome, had apprenticed with Eli Terry in the wood-clock era of 1816. Later, in the financial panic of 1837, Jerome saw the future of rolled brass. He borrowed $12,920 from Thomas Barnes Jr., whose son, Wallace, founded the Barnes spring company in 1857 — now the global Barnes Group Inc., still headquartered in Bristol.

That same remarkable year, 1857, the Sargent brothers moved from New York to take over a hardware concern in New Britain, which they converted into a lock-maker, and later moved to New Haven. Connecticut became a center of lock-making, especially in Stamford, where Linus Yale Jr., inventor of the cylinder lock, teamed with engineer Henry Towne.

Along Capitol Avenue in Hartford, the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Co. revolutionized long guns with breech loading — and also made sewing machines for Weed, which eventually took over the Sharps factory.

Guns still dominated in Connecticut In 1873, a decade after Sam Colt died, as Colt’s produced the Single Action Army “Peacemaker,” and Winchester introduced its Model 1873 rifle. Both firearms would become known as “The Gun That Won the West.”

Hartford was established as the machining capital of the world. The stage was set for explosive growth. But it would come from products few people at the time had ever seen.