My highlights from the book:
1. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it. By the time he died in 1862 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of the most famous men in nation, and one of the richest.
2. In doing so, he had solved, or at least started to solve, one of the great technological challenges of the early nineteenth century: how to make a gun shoot multiple bullets without reloading.
3. He was a classic disruptor who not only invented a world-changing product but produced it and sold it in world-changing ways.
4. He bridled at being under any authority other than his own. His dogma was the gospel of self-determination. “It is better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion.”
5. At eighteen, he went up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in a steamboat, and, at nineteen, down the Erie Canal on a canalboat. He was rich by the time he was twenty-one, poor at thirty-one, then rich again at forty-one. He may have had a secret marriage and almost certainly had a son he pretended was his nephew. His brother John committed an infamous murder that could have been lifted straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story—though in fact it went the other way; Poe lifted a story from it—and while John was waiting to be hanged in New York City, Sam invented a method of blowing up ships in the harbor with underwater electrified cables.
6. At the center of it all was the most advanced factory in the world. While Colt did not single-handedly develop the so-called American System of mass production—using machines to make uniform and interchangeable parts—he was a pioneer of the technological revolution of the 1850s that had nearly as much impact on the world as the American political revolution of the 1770s.
7. Attempts to increase “celerity of fire,” the rate at which projectiles could be discharged from a gun, went back nearly as far as guns themselves.
8. In short, while firearms were easier to use and more dependable at the start of the nineteenth century, the guns of 1830 were essentially what they had been in 1430: single metal tubes or barrels stuffed with combustible powder and projectiles. After every shot, the shooter had to carry out a minimum of three steps: pour powder into the barrel; add a projectile (cannonball, lead ball, or later bullet); then ignite the gunpowder and send the projectile on its way.
9. Colts also played a small but important role in the Mexican War in the late 1840s—the war put Colt on the path to riches—and accompanied gold rushers to California in 1849, becoming as indispensable to western sojourners and settlers as shovels, picks, and boots. Next to a Bible, a Colt revolver was the best travel insurance available. As such, it emboldened Americans contemplating a western journey. The west would have been settled sooner or later, but how it was settled and when it was settled owed a great deal to Colt’s gun.
10. Above all he was relentless.
11. We tend to be more comfortable in the company of historical figures who pulled the triggers (soldiers, desperadoes, psychopaths) than those who made the guns, perhaps because the business of manufacturing and selling weapons seems less compelling, and more clinical, than the business of using them. I hope Sam Colt’s life will, if nothing else, defy that expectation.
12. His refusal to admit defeat would appear almost delusional at times.
13. Self-determination took deep root in my heart and to has been the mark that has and shall control my destiny.
14. Don’t for the sake of your own good name think again of being a subordinate. You had better blow out your brains at once & manure an honest man’s ground with your carcass than to hang your ambition on so low a peg.
15. Every cut of the jackknife an act of quiet vengeance not only against those who had flogged him but against the nameless forces that had snatched away his childhood with financial ruin and death.
16. One half of Sam Colt was the buncoing fabulist, the walking bonfire of other people’s money, the drinker and carouser; the other half was a truly gifted inventor.
17. Nights went to selling nitrous oxide, days to improving his gun.
18. Colt was certainly brazen enough to steal, but he was also ingenious enough to come up with a brilliant creation on his own. It’s also possible that the entire episode never happened and Colt made it up. He was capable of that, too.
19. But more important than Roswell’s money would be the contacts he helped Sam cultivate in coming months; and more important still would be the encouragement Roswell gave to the young entrepreneur.
20. At times, Colt had a focus so narrow as to almost literally obscure his peripheral vision.
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