Colt, Samuel (1814 -1862)

Inventor of the Colt revolver, Samuel Colt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Christopher Colt (1777–1850) and Sarah Caldwell, who died from tuberculosis when Colt was six years old. Colt’s entrepreneurial and innovative character enabled him to develop the repeating revolving pistol, and on his death, he was one of the wealthiest men in America. His use of interchangeable parts helped him become one of the first to use the assembly line efficiently at his Hartford factory, the Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company, set up in 1848. On June 5, 1856, Colt married secondly Elizabeth Jarvis, the daughter of the Rev. William Jarvis. The couple had four children: two daughters and a son who died in infancy and a son born in 1858. He also fathered Samuel Caldwell Colt, the offspring of an earlier marriage in Scotland in 1838 to Caroline Henshaw, who in 1841 married his brother, John. Colt set up libraries and educational programs within his armories for his employees, which were seminal training grounds for several generations of toolmakers and other machinists, who had great influence in other manufacturing industries of the next half century. Samuel Colt died of gout in Hartford on January 10, 1862. His estate, left to his wife and three-year-old son Caldwell Hart Colt, and to Samuel Caldwell Colt, was estimated to be worth around $15 million.