Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (review)

No one questions that the Colt Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company was one of the most technically advanced and influential manufacturing establishments in mid-nineteenth-century America. Its founder, Samuel Colt (1814–62) patented a novel revolving pistol bearing his name, built a state-of-the-art factory at Hartford, Connecticut, and hired a talented plant superintendent who made it a showplace of the American system of manufactures. Many former Colt employees went on to organize businesses of their own, thereby applying "armory practice" methods to the manufacture of other technically related products like sewing machines and typewriters. They also played a key role in establishing the American machine-tool industry.

Given all that has been written about Colt and his famous revolvers, one might legitimately ask why yet another book on Colt is needed. The answer is quickly found in the pages of this beautifully produced book. Designed to accompany an exhibit of the same title at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, Samuel Colt adds significantly to our understanding of the inventor and the company that bears his name by approaching its subject from the standpoint of material culture: the guns he produced, the firearms he collected, the artists he patronized, and the art objects he used to market his products.

The volume has three major sections, all of which emphasize the material culture of the Colt company, its products, and its marketing strategies. The first contribution is by Carolyn Cooper, well-known to readers of this journal for her prizewinning work on woodworking technologies and patent management in nineteenth-century America. In an essay titled "A Connecticut Yankee Courts the World," Cooper places Samuel Colt in larger context by relating his enterprise to the Indian Wars of the pre–Civil War period, American expansionism, the Crimean War, the Sepoy Mutiny, and international events like London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. The story is well told and provides an excellent backdrop for the more concentrated Colt accounts that follow.

The second section, by arms historian Herbert Houze, is the most detailed and comprehensive part of the book. It closely scrutinizes the firearms in Colt's personal collection (as well as Colt-made firearms gathered together by his widow shortly after his death) and, in the process, sheds much light on how he conducted his business affairs. While looking closely at each item in the Colt collection and providing careful documentation from primary sources, Houze argues that "Colt redefined the architecture of handguns [and] was quite possibly the first American manufacturer to use art as a marketing tool" (p. 20). His detailed treatment of the collection amounts to a good deal more than a catalog of objects. Among other things, he shows that Colt assembled his collection in a very purposeful manner to study precedents in breech-loading and revolving firearms, and to use the assembled artifacts to solidify and strengthen his own patent claims.

One of the most interesting parts of Houze's discussion focuses on those individuals who copied, counterfeited, and competed with Colt in the small-arms market. These pages reveal Colt as an astute businessman who knew how to protect his patents as well as how to penetrate a rapidly growing global market for machine-made firearms. Above all, they underscore Colt's greatest asset as a manufacturer: namely, his ability to surround himself with highly competent workers, managers, and business advisors. This, in turn, gave him the freedom to focus on marketing his products far beyond the continental boundaries of the United States, at a time when most manufacturers focused on local and/or regional markets.

In the third and final section of the book, Elizabeth Kornhauser expands upon a theme previously introduced by Cooper and Houze: Colt's marketing genius. Of special interest is her discussion of Colt's patronage of the renowned artist George Catlin, especially his series of ten paintings depicting himself using Colt firearms to hunt various wild animals and...