Colt's ambition, however, soared beyond the occupation of itinerant showman, and he never forgot his revolver.As soon as he had money enough, he made models of the new arm and took out his patents; and, having enlisted the interest of capital, he set up the Patent Arms Company at Paterson, New Jersey, to manufacture the revolver.He did not succeed in having the revolver adopted by the Government, for the army officers for a long time objected to the percussion cap (an invention, by the way, then some twenty years old, which was just coming into use and without which Colt's revolver would not have been practicable) and thought that the new weapon might fail in an emergency.Colt found a market in Texas and among the frontiersmen who were fighting the Seminole War in Florida, but the sales were insufficient, and in 1842 the company was obliged to confess insolvency and close down the plant.Colt bought from the company the patent of the revolver, which was supposed to be worthless.
Nothing more happened until after the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846.Then came a loud call from General Zachary Taylor for a supply of Colt's revolvers.Colt had none.He had sold the last one to a Texas ranger.He had not even a model.Yet he took an order from the Government for a thousand and proceeded to construct a model.For the manufacture of the revolvers he arranged with the Whitney plant at Whitneyville.There he saw and scrutinized every detail of the factory system that Eli Whitney had established forty years earlier.He resolved to have a plant of his own on the same system and one that would far surpass Whitney's.Next year (1848) he rented premises in Hartford.His business prospered and increased.At last the Government demanded his revolvers.Within five years he had procured a site of two hundred and fifty acres fronting the Connecticut River at Hartford, and had there begun the erection of the greatest arms factory in the world.
Colt was a captain of captains.The ablest mechanic and industrial organizer in New England at that time was Elisha K.
Root.Colt went after him, outbidding every other bidder for his services, and brought him to Hartford to supervise the erection of the new factory and set up its machinery.Root was a great superintendent, and the phenomenal success of the Colt factory was due in a marked degree to him.He became president of the company after Colt's death in 1862, and under him were trained a large number of mechanics and inventors of new machine tools, who afterwards became celebrated leaders and officers in the industrial armies of the country.
The spectacular rise of the Colt factory at Hartford drew the attention of the British Government, and in 1854 Colt was invited to appear in London before a Parliamentary Committee on Small Arms.He lectured the members of the committee as if they had been school boys, telling them that the regular British gun was so bad that he would be ashamed to have it come from his shop.
Speaking of a plant which he had opened in London the year before he criticized the supposedly skilled British mechanic, saying: "Ibegan here by employing the highest-priced men that I could find to do difficult things, but I had to remove the whole of these high-priced men.Then I tried the cheapest I could find, and the more ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose;and the result was this: I had men now in my employ that Istarted with at two shillings a day, and in one short year I can not spare them at eight shillings a day."* Colt's audacity, however, did not offend the members of the committee and they decided to visit his American factory at Hartford.They did; and were so impressed that the British Government purchased in America a full set of machines for the manufacture of arms in the Royal Small Arms factory at Enfield, England, and took across the sea American workmen and foremen to set up and run these.
machines.A demand sprang up in Europe for Blanchard copying lathes and a hundred other American tools, and from this time on the manufacture of tools and appliances for other manufacturers, both at home and abroad, became an increasingly important industry of New England.
* Henry Barnard, "Armsmear", p.371.
The system which the gunmakers worked out and developed to meet their own requirements was capable of indefinite expansion.It was easily adapted to other kinds of manufacture.So it was that as new inventions came in the manufacturers of these found many of the needed tools ready for them, and any special modifications could be quickly made.A manufacturer, of machine tools will produce on demand a device to perform any operation, however difficult or intricate.Some of the machines are so versatile that specially designed sets of cutting edges will adapt them to almost any work.
Standardization, due to the machine tool, is one of the chief glories of American manufacturing.Accurate watches and clocks, bicycles and motor cars, innumerable devices to save labor in the home, the office, the shop, or on the farm, are within the reach of all, because the machine tool, tended by labor comparatively unskilled, does the greater part of the work of production.In the crisis of the World War, American manufacturers, turning from the arts of peace, promptly adapted their plants to the manufacture of the most complicated engines of destruction, which were produced in Europe only by skilled machinists of the highest class.
