Who was Samuel Colt? He is most well known for making the revolver that helped define the Wild West. The “gun that won the west” has become an icon in American history. However, this article will be focusing more on facts about Samuel Colt that are not widely known to the public. Oh, and if you need a gun, we recommend something like this site to buy colt guns to honor him in the right way.
1) At age 16 (1824) while attending a local school, Sam Colt had a fight with another student and was sent to a boarding school in the nearby town of Willington. While there he studied his favorite subject which was science. One day during religious instruction Samuel became upset that the teacher was espousing some doctrine that seemed wrong to him. He began arguing with him about the subject, and the school’s headmaster heard about it. The headmaster told both of them that if they wanted to argue the point, he would give them a book and both could study their respective positions and Sam be allowed to stay at school during his free time. At the end of three months, they were required to stand up before the rest of the students and give an oral debate on their respective positions. Sam, who had been studying the subject in his free time, defeated the instructor with a very good argument.
2) In 1831 Samuel Colt tried to finance “Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company”. He was able to get a loan from the U.S> government of $50,000.
3) In 1836 at age 22 Samuel Colt went to London and patented a revolving-breech pistol for use by the British army. His first model had a smooth bore with a .44 caliber ball but it didn’t have enough velocity to kill from long range. He made another model that used a rifled bore, had a 5-inch barrel and fired a .46 caliber ball. He demonstrated it to the British army but they rejected it.
4) In 1841 Samuel Colt came up with yet another new revolver that would fire the same ammunition as revolvers already in use. The chambers of this pistol were bored into cylinders so the bullets could be loaded from the front. This made it much simpler to load than pistols with multiple chambers bored into one cylinder, which was the common method at the time.
5) Colt’s patent for his revolver design ran out in 1857 and so did his company after trying to fight off imitations of his invention by other gunmakers. In 1861 Colt’s factory in Hartford was burned down by an arsonist. It has been said that had he not been forced out of business, the American Civil War would have been over before it began because Colt’s weapons were used to a large extent on both sides.
6) As a young man, Samuel Colt was not very popular. Strangely enough, his lack of social graces didn’t bother him too much because he would spend all of his time studying science and mathematics.
7) The first firearm that Sam Colt ever designed had nothing to do with the revolver that made him famous for pioneering the weapons that helped define the Old West. Sam Colt actually designed (and patented) a submarine!
8) The first firearm that Samuel Colt ever made was for his own protection. He used it to stop two men from robbing him while he was traveling in Paris, France. One of the men attacked him with a knife and Sam shot him with.
