Samuel Colt (born July 19, 1814,Hartford,Connecticut, U.S.—died January 10, 1862, Hartford) was an American firearms inventor, manufacturer, andentrepreneur who popularized therevolver.

As a teenaged seaman, Colt carved a wooden model of a revolving cylinder mechanism, and he later perfected a working version that was patented in England and France in 1835 and in theUnited States the following year. Featuring a multichambered cylinder that rotated and locked by cocking the hammer, Colt’s repeating single-barreled pistols, rifles, and shotguns were slow to gain acceptance, and a company that formed to manufacture them inPaterson,New Jersey, failed in 1842. The following year he devised an electrically dischargednaval mine, the first device using a remotely controlled explosive, and he conducted atelegraph business thatutilized the first underwater cable.

1 of 2

2 of 2

Word that Colt’s multishot Paterson weapons had been effective against Indians in Texas prompted a government order for 1,000 pistols during theMexican-American War, and Colt resumed firearms manufacture in 1847. In 1855 he built the world’s largest private armoury in the South Meadows area of Hartford. Assisted by engineer-superintendentElisha King Root, he developed beyond any private industrialist before him the mass manufacture of firearms by usinginterchangeable parts and machine production, and he applied progressive ideas concerning employee welfare. His invention made him a wealthy man. At the time of his death in 1862, his firm already had produced some 450,000 guns in 16 different models. Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company produced the pistols most widely used during theAmerican Civil War, and its six-shot single-action .45-calibrePeacemaker model, introduced in 1873, became the most-famous sidearm of the American West.

Britannica Quiz

Weaponry, Energy, and Power Systems Quiz

The company also became famed for its production of theGatling gun, a hand-crankedmachine gun invented byRichard J. Gatling, and for a series of John M. Browning-designed semiautomatic pistols, most notably the Model 1911. Having been sold by Colt Industries in 1989, the Colt Firearms Division was reconstituted as Colt’s Manufacturing Company. Today the enterprise is best known for government-contract production of the M16assault rifle in all its manyiterations and for theAR-15 semiautomatic rifle.