Founders - #147 Sam Colt

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

What I learned from reading Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America by Jim Rasenberger.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes----[0:01] Sam Colt embodied the America of his time. He was big brash, voracious, imaginative, and possessed extraordinary drive and energy. He was a classic disruptor who not only invented a world-changing product but produced it and sold it in world-changing ways. [1:59] He had solved one of the great technological challenges of the early 19th century. [2:36] He was rich at 21. Poor at 31. Then rich again at 41. [7:10] Sam Colt solved a 400-year-old problem. The guns of 1830 were essentially what they had been in 1430.[7:53] There's a financial panic in 1819. This is a very important part in the life of Sam Colt. It may explain why he was such a hard worker, ruthless, and determined. The panic of 1819 bankrupts his family. [10:48] What kind of person would do this voluntarily? He was set to embark on a 17,000-mile voyage across the Atlantic, around the horn of Africa, through the Indian ocean and to the city of Calcutta. Honeymoon was not quite the word to describe a 17,000-mile voyage to Calcutta in 1830. [13:57] 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.”[14:19] Self-determination took deep root in my heart and to has been the mark that has and shall control my destiny. [16:14] 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. [19:58] He saw a nation brimming with industry and ingenuity and hope. And at the same time, anxiety, fear and brutality. [20:55] Nights went to [selling] nitrous oxide, days to improving his gun. [22:31] This description of the book sold me on buying it: 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.[27:19] 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. [30:46] Why guns were the first mass-produced product in America: But the government was not in the business of sewing or telling time; it very much was in the business of preparing for war, even if there were no wars to be fought just then. As a result, guns were among the first, and by far the most important, mass-produced items in the United States. Because the government was the main buyer of guns, it dictated how the guns were made. And it had a deep interest in solving problems of gun manufacturing. [37:23] I’m amazed at how much life Sam Colt fit into 47 short years.[38:43] One of the main takeaways of the book is Everything sucks. I’m moving forward anyways. [38:58] His refusal to admit defeat would appear almost delusional at times. [39:34] The paradox of Sam Colt: 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. [42:20] If you are in a great market the market will pull the product out of you. [48:52] Sam Colt is extreme. This is him admonishing his younger brother for not being ambitious enough: 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.[49:15] The anger and frustration was real and his desire to be his own master and master of others was sincere. [52:27] I've spent the last 10 years of my life without profit in perfecting military inventions. How many people are willing to work this hard and not give up after a decade? [54:17] The opening of a new market: [Sam] Walker had done a great deal for Colt in the weeks since they began exchanging letters in November. Most important, he had single-handedly persuaded the Ordnance Department to contravene its long-standing objection to Colt’s pistols. [57:40] After his first business fails he is determined to control his second attempt: “I am working on my own hook and have sole control and management of my business. No longer subject to the whims of a pack of dam fools styling themselves a board of directors. [1:07:19] He was metabolically wired for productivity. He is without exception the hardest working man that I know of.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.”— GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book. It's good for you. It's good for Founders. A list of all the books featured on Founders Podcast. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Sam Colt embodied the America of his time. He was big, brash, voracious, imaginative, and possessed extraordinary drive and energy. He was a classic disruptor, who not only invented a world-changing product, but produced it and sold it in world-changing ways. He became the prototype for hundreds of such disruptors to come, from Thomas Edison to Henry Ford to Thomas Watson to Steve Jobs. Friends admired him for his generosity, his warmth, and his boldness. Adversaries reviled him for his dishonesty and his rapaciousness.

He possessed all of these qualities, but above all, he was relentless. Because he was a man with his own distasteful truths and heirs willing to hide them, Colt left behind rabbit holes, ellipses, traps for his future biographers. The missing pages of a journal, for instance, that he kept when he was 17 that might have shed light on his experience aboard a slave ship to New Orleans, or the letters of women with whom he shared his bed, which have mostly, though not entirely, been culled from his archives. One of his brothers once accused Colt of having a wife in every port, but the exact nature of his amorous relations is mostly a matter of conjecture. Colt has not been treated seriously by historians or

biographers. We tend to be more comfortable in the company of historical figures who pulled the triggers. Soldiers, desperados, 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. He had solved one of the great technological challenges of the early 19th century, how to make a gun shoot multiple bullets without reloading. For more than two decades, Sam Colt would strive to perfect and market his revolving gun and wait for the world to catch up to his idea. In the meantime, he lived in perpetual motion. Centrifugal chaos, one biographer has called it.

At 17, he began touring the country as a traveling showman. At 18, he went up the Mississippi River in a steamboat. At 19, down the Erie Canal on a canal boat. He was rich by the time he was 21, poor at 31, then rich again at 41. 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, Sam invented a method of blowing up ships in the harbor with

underwater electrified cables. And at the center of his life story is 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. Compared to other great innovations of his era, such as Cyrus McCormick's Reaper,

Charles Goodyear's Vulcanized Rubber, and Samuel Morse's Telegraph, Colt's gun, a few pounds in the hand, was just a featherweight. But it did as much if not more than those others to make the world that was coming what follows is a work of fact for better or for worse with no agenda other than to honestly tell what happened to sam colt his gun and america in the years 1814 to 1862 that was an excerptpt from the book that I'm going to talk to

you about today, which is Revolver, Sam Colt and the Six Shooter that Changed America by Jim Rassenberger. So before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you how Sam Colt ties into everything that we're working on and studying on the podcast, how influential he was to future generations of entrepreneurs. So Henry Leland, who I did a podcast on a few months ago, who was the founder of Cadillac and Lincoln. Interesting enough, he started Cadillac when he was 60 years old and Lincoln when he was 70 years old. But he worked at the Colt factory and the precision and the focus on detail that he learned in that factory, he brought with him as a grown adult man to the early automobile industry that was taking place in Michigan.

He was much older, almost two, I would say two decades older than most of the entrepreneurs trying to build the early American car companies. Leland has to be one of the most influential entrepreneurs that have ever existed, if you think about it. He directly influenced the Dodge brothers. Horace Dodge worked in Leland's machine shop for years before he started his own company. Leland influenced Billy Durant, the founder of General Motors. When Henry Ford had a problem that he could not figure out how to solve, he went to Leland to ask for advice. Alfred Sloan, let me read this quote from one of the books I read a few months ago. It's called Billy Alfred and General Motors.

So Alfred Sloan famously was the CEO of General Motors for, what, three decades, something like that? And he says, Leland was a perfectionist who expected and demanded higher standards than any of his peers. He learned that that eye for perfectionism in the coal factory. He accepted no excuses and suffered no fools. A man after Alfred Sloan's own heart. Sloan devoted more words and detail to what he learned from Leland than he did to any other person. And Sloan was not the kind of person. He did not have the personality to give out praise. And this trend continues throughout history. So not only did Alfred Sloan learn the most from Henry Leland, but then Henry Singleton picks up

Alfred Sloan's biography, My Years of General Motors, and uses an idea he found in that book to build Teledyne. And then who comes on after that? Warren Buffett, heavily influenced by Henry Singleton. So quickly, I just wanted to draw that picture for you so you understand where Colt fits into the history of American entrepreneurship and why he is so important and why he's so worthy of study. So let's go and jump into one of the most remarkable things I learned from this book. It's the fact that Colt solved a very old problem. So the book says attempts to increase the rate at which projectiles could be discharged from a gun went back nearly as far as guns themselves. In fact, Leonardo da Vinci conceived a giant duck footed gun with 10 splayed barrels.

That's back in the 1500s. It's called interesting enough. It's called a duck because the barrels flamed out or fanned out rather like the feet of ducks the technology that that colt is improving upon it was basically unchanged for 400 years so to think about the life and the career of sam colt is he solved a 400 year old problem i thought that was fascinating so it says while firearms were easier to use and more dependable at the start of the 19th century the guns of 1830 when he started working in the industry, or working on his prototype rather, were essentially what they had been in 1430. Single metal tubes of barrels stuffed with combustible powder and projectiles. After each shot, the shooter had to carry out a minimum of three steps, pour powder into a barrel,

add a projectile, then ignite the gunpowder and send the projectile on its way. So it's vastly different than what a revolver does, where you can just fire multiple shots without reloading. So let me jump into his early life before I get into his ideas on how he built his business. So there's a financial panic of 1819, and this is a very important part in the life of Sam Colt and probably adds to why he was such a hard worker and he was ruthless and determined because it bankrupts his family. He's only five years old at the time.

So it says many Americans were ruined by it, meaning the financial panic of 1819. And Christopher Colt, which was Sam's father, was one of them. Later, Sam would recall his mother getting the news that his father had gone bankrupt. He was playing under the piano in the drawing room. Sarah, his mother, clashedped her hands and cried out, My poor little children. Gets worse from here. Four years later, his mother dies of tuberculosis.

Christopher Colt was now 41, in debt, and the father of eight motherless children. And most of these eight children are not going to survive. The amount of pain and heartache that his family had to endure is unimaginable. I do want to tell you something about where he grew up, which the reason I want to bring this up is because I think it's influential to the field that he eventually starts working in. He lived in Connecticut and they describe the area where he's growing up is very similar to like the Silicon Valley of its day. So it says the Connecticut River Valley had been described as the Silicon Valley of its day. That description captures the synergy of concentrated talent and technology that surrounded Sam Holt in Hartford.

The important fact of his youth is that he was not exposed to guns in the usual ways that many American boys were, as hunting weapons or as tools, but as products to be improved, manufactured and sold. Around this time, he's a rather uncontrollable young. He's a teenager at this time, really uncontrollable, really wild and reckless. I mean, he kind of carries those those traits his entire life, actually. But he winds up becoming interested in this mill that is by his house. And so he gets a tour from some of the people that work there. And essentially what's happening, this excerpt I'm about to read to you, is he's studying the modern technology of his day.

So it says, when Colt descended into the mill, he got a free education in the modern technology circa 1830. The most striking fact of the early Industrial Revolution was that it was revolutionary in a literal sense. Everything turned. A young man with a mechanical bent could learn a great deal simply by watching, studying how things connected, how they turned, and how they revolved. Now that part was actually really important because it's demonstrating his ability to practice self-learning. And self-learning was extremely important in the life of Sam Colt because he gets kicked out of school.

He has this tendency to blow things up. He actually gets expelled. He's just not a good fit for formal schooling. This is a common theme that we've seen on this podcast, no doubt. So I'm going to fast forward to the point where he's almost an adult. At 17 years old, he has really no options.

His family doesn't have a lot of money. He doesn't know what to do with his life. And I'm going to read what he voluntarily does. And the note I left myself is what kind of person would do this voluntarily? He was set to embark on a 17,000 mile voyage across the Atlantic around the Horn of Africa through the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the city of Calcutta. Honeymoon was not quite the word to describe a 17,000 mile voyage to Calcutta in 1830. So he's not doing this for leisure. He's working as a deckhand, as a sailor on the boat. And this is an extremely trying and difficult job to do, especially being gone for

half a year, traveling 17,000 miles to places all over the globe. And the author does a great job of describing, like, what is this environment like? It says, along with the new sailors' challenge of learning the ropes, Colt had to handle himself among some of the most hardened and profane men on Earth. Sailors were famous for drinking, swearing, whoring, and fighting. It's an environment where you cannot be soft at all. He was expected to be on his feet working. Seasoned sailors had no sympathy for the seasick

and no tolerance for lying about. Work for a sailor often meant climbing high into the rigging of the ship, where every roll and dive was compounded. A seasick sailor was a desperate creature, grasping ropes with blistered hands so as not to be flung off the rigging and into the sea while trying to retain the contents of his stomach and some semblance

of his dignity. We know a lot about his time on the boat because there was a group of missionaries that were going to go and try to convert the people in Calcutta to whatever religion. I don't remember what religion was.. It could be Mormon. It might have been just Catholic or something like that. But they have a diary. The diary survived. And so that's how we get this insight into Colt's time on the ship. And so this is how one of Colt's fellow passengers, this missionary, saw Colt's situation on the boat.

Worst of all, wrote Hervey, a young sailor such as Colt had none to pity him when sick or care for him when dead. So in other words, you're on your own. You are forced to be self-reliant. This extreme version of self-reliance is as close as we get to dogma and a life philosophy of Sam Colt, something he carries with him for the rest of his life. And we're going to see why, because he has really extreme experiences on the ship. Before I get there, more time. This is a little bit he has really extreme experiences on the ship. Before I get there, more time. This is a little bit more about Sam's time on the ship. Sailors' labors were unrelenting.

He was never given more than four hours of sleep between watches, and hours on watch were spent in constant maintenance of the ship. They were tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing. They're essentially like miniature little countries out in international waters and this also i think is a an early impetus to something we see in sam's life constantly he has a a very strong desire to be in control because on the ship he's not in control uh a ship at sea was the opposite of a democracy at best it was a benign dictatorship in which all powers and rights emanated from a wise and just captain.

At worst, it was a prison ruled by petty tyrants. Colt's future suggests that he did not object to rank or even absolute rule on principle, because that's how he ran his company and his life, but he bridled at being under any authority other than his own. Insofar as he would ever express a dogma, it was the gospel of self-determination. It is better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion, he would write 14 years later. Continues to expound on his belief in self-determination. Its sentiment, meaning self-determination, took deep root in my heart and two, has been the mark which has and shall Now, if there's something that happens on a ship, there's a series of punishments that are administered depending on what happens.

And a very common punishment at this time was called flogging. Now, this is a description of flogging. In this established ritual, all hands were called to the deck to bear witness. The thief, in this case, somebody on the ship, got caught stealing food. And this is the punishment that's administered. The thief's shirt was stripped off. He was bound to the rigging, prone and spread eagle, so his back could receive the whip. Then it began. A single lash on a bare back was excruciating as the leather bit into the skin and instantly raised a welt. Every lash that followed was worse.

This is now a description from one of the missionaries in his journal or his diary. The man writhes under pain until he could endure it no longer the guy writing the missionary's name that's writing this his name ramsay ramsay gave the name of the flogged sailor in his journal it was colt remember he's 17 and this is happening to him this is the author's interpretation of colt's response to being flogged he seems to have drawn power from the experience, fortifying his resolve to serve no master but himself. It's also really important that in the little downtime that he has on the ship, this is when he actually gets the idea. He makes a wooden model. He's carving a wooden model while he's going on this journey of his idea for a revolver. And this is a description of that and

just really great writing by the author. Colt never explained why the gun came into his mind in the first place, but it's not hard to imagine that a young man who had suffered as he had would have weapons on his mind. Every cut of the jackknife, an act of quiet vengeance, not only against those who flogged him, but against the nameless forces that had snatched away his childhood with financial ruin and death what better way to retaliate than to create an instrument that beat death at its own game and could make him rich in the bargain so this is a little bit about how why the this innovation came from his work on the ship and we see this all the time great ideas are buried in histories uh there's a ton of examples where an idea that's been passed away,

picked up several centuries later. Another example of this is where people are working in one domain. They come up with an idea and they apply it to a new domain. That's the that's exactly what happens to Sam. And he realizes, hey, the way that the that this mechanism was working on the ship, I could apply that same mechanism to my this idea I have for a revolver. So he says where he distinguished himself was in figuring out how to rotate the cylinder, how to turn it from chamber to chamber,

how to index a chamber so that it lined up in perfect sync with the barrel in front and the hammer behind, and how to lock the chamber tightly so the shot would get off cleanly and safely. So what they're talking about there is a lot of people had attempted before to make a gun that you didn't have to reload. But a lot of them, this idea of cleanly and safely, that it gets off cleanly and safely so what they're talking about there is a lot of people had attempted before to make a gun that you didn't have to reload but a lot of them were this idea cleanly and safely that it gets off cleanly and safely the previous attempts at making a revolver uh would explode in the person's hand they chew projectiles almost anywhere except straight and go off the sides behind so extremely dangerous and um so colt's was the first one where yeah you could still have misfires but in large part it worked as intended, let me get back to this part, though. To turn his cylinder, Colt used a tiny gear like this called a ratchet. Now, where do you get that idea? Colt had spent time on the ship studying the windlass, which employed a ratchet to hoist up the anchor. The ratchet, now this is the most important sentence in this entire section, the ratchet in Colt's gun was minuscule by comparison to a windlass's ratchet, but it

worked more or less the same way. So he took the exact same principle, miniaturized it, and applied it to a different domain. In retrospect, using a paw to push a ratchet, to turn a cylinder, to fire a gun, sounds like fairly basic applied mechanics. But in 1831, it was nothing less than revolutionary. So that's the first hint to the paradox that was Sam Colt. Because he was undoubtedly wild, reckless, uncontrollable, but he was also a gifted inventor. And he set his mind to the constant improvement of not only his product, but then his life, his business, his factory. And we see this over and over again. I'll get there more in a little bit. So in the meantime, he survives this journey. He's like, I'm never doing that again. And he comes back to America. He has no money. He's got

an idea, but he's got no money. So he decides to take off. And this is very common at this time in American history. And he's going to travel all over the country trying to make money so i'm going to give you a little background on that and then it's going to be really surprising how he does this or what he does i should say he embarked on a journey a tour of thousands of miles that would take him to nearly every city in the nation as he joined a great human tide of peddlers and tinkers. Some of the other people doing this, they were traveling dentists, fly-by-night medicine men, fleet-footed lottery salesmen, footloose dance instructors, and roaming preachers and nomadic portrait painters,

and many, many more. We don't know exactly the, funny, the nomadic portrait painter. That was a description of, last week I talked to you about Milton Hershey. That's what his father did. Traveled all over and he couldn't make money. He was a nomadic portrait painter that was a description of last week i talked to you about milton hershey that's what his father did travel all over and he couldn't make money he he was a nomadic portrait painter we don't know exactly where colt went on his journey because he left no clear record of it but he did drop enough clues a receipt here a newspaper notice there to let us form a picture not just of his life but of the america he saw a nation brimming with industry and ingenuity and hope, and at the same time, anxiety, fear, and brutality.

Now this is what he was doing while traveling. Colt was selling hits of nitrous oxide gas to fund the development of his gun. And the note I left myself on this page is, wait a minute, he's giving public demonstrations of laughing gas? I did not see that coming. Nitrous oxide had a lot to recommend it as a road friendly elixir. Besides the relative trans trans, it was easy to transport. The gas combined the self-improving appeal of science, meaning Cole began a lot of his demonstrations with a serious sounding lecture on chemistry. So he combines the improving appeal of science

with the allure of spectacle. So he'd give a lecture, then after lecture's done, people come up, and if they wanted to expose themselves to laughing gas, they would do so. And his schedule at the time, he's extremely focused during the day. So it says nights went to nitrous oxide,

days to improving his gun. Right now he's currently in the store. He's in Albany. Albany was where Colt's efforts became intense and focused for a few possible reasons. He had saved enough on his travels to afford to spend large sums, and the city had a number of accomplished gunsmiths who could carry out the kinds of sophisticated detail work he required.

So he would constantly have an idea, a prototype. He'd bring it to somebody, pay somebody to put his idea into practice, and then constantly work with them to do refinements. But he's also has to be focused because he's not the only one. Again, this is a problem that a lot of people are attempting to solve. No one's doing it successfully. The first person to solve it and get the patent on it, which winds up being Colt, is going to be wealthy as a result of that. But it's not like, if you remember what I said in the introduction, he's rich at 21, poor at 31, rich at 41. His life is not at all like you expect. This idea, this business that he's building right now is going

to fail massively, right? He's going to be distracted and brought back in by other factors that were beyond his control. So it's going to take him about 15 to 17 years to have a successful product, which is his revolver, and the ability to mass produce that product. And then that, he dies at 47 years old. And during the last few years of his life, his business just explodes and just grows. Oh, you know what? I forgot to read you something. Let me read. So I was looking for a book on Sam Colt.

And let me read you this product description I found on Amazon. And this description of the book is what sold me on buying it. And I think reading this paragraph to you, I should have done this at the beginning, gives you an overview of where we're going with the story and why it's such an, it was an incredible book. And Sam Colt lived an incredible life. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Sam Colt to vivid life. In the space of his 47 years, he seemingly lived five lives.

He traveled, womanized, drank, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with 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 in 1862 he was one of the most famous men in the nation and one of the richest so as soon as i read that i ordered the book i was like i have to learn more about this guy. Okay, so he finds a really, really talented artisan. His name is Pearson. He's the one that's going to be doing a lot of the work for him. But the reason I'm bringing up the section is not so much to tell you about that. It's really to tell you about the personality of Sam Colt at 19. And these traits are, I don't think they ever go away. In fact, they probably get more pronounced as he progresses with age.

He's stubborn, he's bold, he's determined, he's single-minded and he's a bit of a shit. If you remember back, I think it was on Founders Number 129, Felix Dennis wrote that book, How to Get Rich, which is one of the most recommended books for me to cover on the podcast. And in it, he talks about like the traits

that he feels are very helpful for anybody trying to do something difficult, like building a company or otherwise. And you know, a lot of those traits are determination, single minded, he says, and there's a line in the book and being a bit of a shit helps. So says Colt was 19 years old. Pearson and Baxter, these are the people he's working with, were both a decade or so older. They were established and serious family men who Colt had failed to pay as promised. So he's doing everything on a shoestring budget, which I'll talk about a lot. Yet Colt's response to them was to keep working. And by the way, be sure the task was completed to

his satisfaction before he returned. So what they're talking about, he's traveling. When he runs out of money, he's got to go back on the road to sell nitrous oxide hits. Right. And then he's really slow to pay bills because he doesn't he's not he has no money. And they complain. They're like, hey, you're behind on payments. He's like, yeah, OK, that's fine. Make sure the work's done as I need it. Better be like the qualities. This is what I mean about being a bit of a shit. And this is where the author is going to go into. He had stunning confidence. He was right. Others were wrong. For the rest of his life, he would encounter the world on these terms. This would be one of his greatest assets. This is the gift and the curse we talk about over and

over again, right? Your strengths can also be your greatest weaknesses. He would be one of, this would be one of his greatest assets as he pushed his way through seemingly insurmountable challenges. And oh my God, what this guy has to endure is insane. But also one of his most costly flaws. So you might be asking like, okay, if he's not paying you, he's lecturing you, he's a decade and a half, a decade younger than you, why are you putting up with this? Colt was a master salesman.

He could convince people to buy his products. He can convince people to come work for him. He could convince you to do what he wanted you to do. So it says, why would Pearson continue working for Colt, who had proved himself completely unreliable as an employer? Colt had a gift for convincing others to do as he pleased. Even after he had become obvious, it was not in their interest to do so. More about Colt working on a shoestring budget. It was not the many tasks Colt assigned that made him so vexing.

This is the perspective from Pearson, the person doing the vast majority of the work for him. Rather, it was his total failure to grasp that every one of these costs money. $50, which is what he sent him, was nowhere near sufficient to cover the gunsmith's wages and pay for materials and other expenses. So he, again, he's on a shoestring budget. He's got to keep stringing people along. He's got creditors. He's also something I should tell you up front that never stops. He's terrible with money,

goes bankrupt multiple times. The only thing that saves him is the fact that there was such high demand later on in life from his product that it would be impossible for him to spend as much money as he's making. So once the prototype's done, he's like, okay, now I need to find a way to manufacture this. He's going to get a patent. He's going to try to build a factory. But before that, he needs money. So he goes and gets seed money from an investor. It was like a cousin's brother, sister kind of relationship. I don't remember. I think it may be his father's cousin. It's like some kind of that. That's the person he's talking to. Roswell was 55 years old in the spring of 1835 and fabulously if erratically wealthy meaning that he's rich and poor and rich and poor again and again this guy was essentially a gambler uh roswell had no

expertise in guns but he was a gambler by nature and saw a bet worth taking a week after their meeting he he gave sam alone for a hundred dollars to which he soon added 200 more uh this initial 300 was critical seed money. But more important than Roswell's money would be the contacts he helped Sam cultivate in the coming months. And more important still would be the encouragement Roswell gave to the young entrepreneur. He just saw somebody that was very like him. Speculator, gambler, willing to take risks. Like Sam, Roswell did not let scruples and sentiment get in the way of pleasure and profit.

He's also very helpful in, they wind up capitalizing one of the first corporations. So they're putting together something that bears very little resemblance to what we think of as a corporation today as far as the actual documents. In a sense, Sam was an employee, which is something he fixes later on in life at his second attempt to build a gun business, a successful attempt. But it's a way to raise money at a time where it was not very easy to raise money. And they wind up raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to build this factory, and it winds up blowing up figuratively and failing, but I'll get there. He also meets somebody. His dad doesn't have a lot of money, but his dad is well-respected. He's one of his friends. I don't know if they were classmates or something like that, but his friend is running the patent office. And this guy's name's Ellsworth,

and he's actually really interesting because he was integral in reforming the patent office and trying to unleash and help American inventors. So it says he urged Sam to go to Europe before he secured his U.S. patent and urged him to hurry. This is just a great sentence. The air was filled with rumors of other repeating guns, which is what revolvers were called at the time,

on both sides of the Atlantic, and every day lost was possibly lost forever. And the book goes into a lot more detail about Ellsworth, but essentially you could summarize he was an evangelist for entrepreneurship and innovation, and he did everything he possibly could for the patent office to assist people creating new products. Something I respect most about Sam Colt, as with a lot of the people I've talked to you about that have this tendency, this personality trait, whatever you want to call it, is they have blinders on

focus. It says, at times, Colt had a focus so narrow as to almost literally obscure his peripheral vision. So Sam's raising money. He's going to get a patent. But I want to talk to you about, there's some, again, some things that are beyond our control and we just have to be adaptable to, we have to react to, right? And so one of the things that he had adapted to and that he benefited from is that guns are going to be one of the first mass produced products in American history. Why? And this part tells us why, and I found it very, very fascinating. So he's visiting other armories that existed this time, getting ideas on how to build a factory. Okay. And this gives us, while he's doing this, the author goes into the history of why this occurred.

And I thought it was fascinating. Whether Colt fully grasped the industrial significance of the Springfield Armory and the other armories he visited is unclear, but it was almost impossible to overstate it. Gun manufacturers leading the country into adopting what would soon be called the American system, which would then evolve much later into the assembly line. How this happened is explained by a combination of causes, but it starts with the fact that government, and only the government, had both the need and the

means to order hundreds or even thousands of the same product. The government might have had a similar compounding effect, for example, on sewing machine industry or the clock industry, had it required thousands of sewing machines and clocks, But the government was not in the business of sewing or telling time. It was in the business of preparing for war. As a result, guns were among the first and by far the most important mass-produced item in the United States. Because the government was the main buyer of guns, it dictated how the guns were made. And it had a deep interest in solving problems of gun manufacturing. So the innovations they made in mass manufacturing guns, Leland learned.

He applied it to his machine shop. Then they apply it to the automobile industry, and it just goes on and on and on. And it's not at all clear what other kind of product would have been able to birth this rapid iterative learning that was taking place at this time in American history. So now I want to talk to you about a gigantic mistake that Sam Colt makes on his first company that he learns from and corrects on his second company. And that's he invests in a gigantic factory, building it from scratch before he has even an idea on how to mass produce something that he's only been able to make, to hand make at this point. And really, this is also a story talking about the bridging the gap between two very different points in history. One of, you know, artisan manufacturing, small groups of people, maybe even individuals to, you know, hand every product slightly different to one of uniformity. One where you can you know i think at some point he's making like 10 000 guns a day something like that so let me read this section

to you though neither sam colton or john pearson were in a position to appreciate the irony the entire patent arms manufacturing company that's the name of sam colt's first company it's hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital it's large factory now rising in patterson it's machines that would be purchased or built to shape the metal to make those thousands of guns, and its dozens of employees who would operate this machine. So I'm just reading off a list of things that are going to suck up all the money that he has, right? All of this came down at the moment to a single gunsmith working with hand tools at a rifle bench in Baltimore. In the transaction between John Pearson, the gunsmith, and Sam Colt

was the shift from an age of skilled tradesmen operating alone or in small groups to build implements by hand to an age in which practically everything made by man would be manufactured by machine. So not only is he spending a lot of money on his company, but he also spends something he's known for his entire life is just spending so much money. As soon as he gets money, he would spend it. The only thing that saves him is the fact that he's able to make so much money later on in life. The demand for his product is so great that it'd be almost impossible to spend money as fast as it was coming in. We're not there at this point, though. We're at a point where he's got a company that's not up and running.

His income is eventually going to rely on the profits of that company. There are no profits yet. So it's Colt spent like a young man who believed he was destined to be rich. And why not? Colt's guns were already drawing serious attention from distant parts of the world. the person in the patent office, the revolver was such a popular attraction among both American and foreign visitors to the patent office that the models on display had been completely worn out because they'd been handled so much. So people might have been interested, but he had no supply to give them. He's still not sure how to mass produce something that, again, previously was made by hand. Simply put, Colt had no guns to sell and would have none for months to come. Production had to wait for the completion of the gun mill, but construction was at least for months to come. Production had to wait for the completion of the gun mill, but construction was at least four months behind schedule.

Not even the samples, the prototypes, the handmade prototypes, were available. They had served as models to impress investors and buyers, but now they were being used as templates to create machine-made replicas. Adapting machines to copy the prototypes was far more difficult than he

or anyone else had anticipated. Factory's not up and running, but Colt has already gone through all of his money. He's now deeply in debt. At a time when a skilled tradesman would do well to earn $600 in a year, $6,000 was an extraordinary sum. That's his salary from the company he started. $6,000 was an extraordinary sum for a young man with only himself to support so how did he go broke he's making 10 times what a skilled tradesman would make at this time uh he's spending money on expensive hotels clothes and alcohol is not very different to what felix dennis told us in that book how to get rich he blew a hundred million dollars in a decade this way and at this point in his life he's also assuming he's like

okay everybody loves my product of course i'm going to figure out how to manufacture it. Of course, we're going to be successful. Of course, the army is going to buy them by the thousands. No, they're not. Not at this point. He gets negative feedback from the ordinance department. So I think it's called like the United States ordinance committee or ordinance department. It's the group, and it still exists to this day, who procures, buys, and tests all the weapons for the troops. And so he gets negative feedback after they tested his revolver. And this is going to suck for him at the moment, but it's good for the quality in the long run because they reveal all the deficiencies that once he improves will make his product a lot better.

So it says there it was uh there was this is a summary of the report entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service the best guns for the service the board concluded were those already in use that's the standard like muskets and rifles that they were using at the time the board's assessment made a good deal of sense given the peculiarities of colt's gun some years later colt himself he was really mad at the time he called them uh grannies people refusing to adopt technology something like that but he says some years later colt himself would acknowledge of his early guns that the board was very justly very justly reported them to be complicated and liable to to be an accident in the hands of the

common soldier now at this part of the book, there's a really interesting story. It goes on for multiple pages, and it's really about human nature. And essentially, it's Colt is failing to overcome existing inertia. And I'm going to give you the moral of the story in this one paragraph here. I think it gives you a good idea of what the author is trying to teach us. But the guns challenged army discipline on a more basic level. By lending themselves to individual and improvisational fighting, they contravened the terms on which army discipline was imposed. Under its own understanding of war, then the ordinance board's verdict was correct.

A repeating firearm was unsuited to battle between 19th century armies. armies this sentence is really important for understanding why colt's there's a bunch of of trends that are happening in american history that are hugely beneficial to colt's business that he has no control over it says it called meaning his revolver for a different kind of fighting force against a different kind of enemy and so even though this is a biography of sam colt what i'm amazed at is just like i'm amazed at how sam colt can fit so much life in 47 short years how the author did a great job of fitting so much such a large history in 400 pages like he said it's a story of sam colt his gun and america from what 1814 to 1862 and so we'll get into what was happening, why and how this benefited Sam Colton

and why it just increased the demand. Just an unfathomable amount of demand for his revolver. You know, this is going to take place about 15 years in the future right now. He's got to fail first, which he's going to fall flat on his face here. But it's just amazing how rapid his circumstances change. So this is 1837. there's a huge financial panic

sam's again the army won't buy them so he's trying to sell weapons to individuals they don't have any money no one was upset to see 1837 end at least of all cold he was broke the advances he received from the pamc that's the company he started had been spent his pay was now based on profits of which there were none and his creditors hound continued to hound him for money he did not have. Not only is he experiencing business failure, but this personal tragedy. One of his sisters dies and his father's, this other business that his father's engaging in selling silk was also failing. And the way I would summarize this is also one of the main takeaways from the book for me is everything sucks. I'm moving forward anyways. If Colt's behavior in these years gave

an impression of a young man self-destructing, it also demonstrated his extraordinary resolve and energy. His refusal to admit defeat would appear almost delusional at times. And what's also amazing to me is even in times of great, great struggle, he's still improving his product. Between plying government officials with liquor and dodging debts, Colt somehow found time to improve his guns and file a new patent in August of 1839. He had put considerable intellectual energy into solving some of the problems of his gun, something he continues to do until he dies i mentioned the paradox earlier this is a great summary of the paradox of sam colt this is a quote from a different historian who says the paradox of colt he put the paradox of colt pithily one half of sam colt was a fabulous the walking bonfire of other people's

money what a great description the drinker and the carouser. The other half was a truly gifted inventor. One of the ideas that we see over and over again is this dedication to simplicity. He's still struggling, but he's got a lot of good ideas, and they all orient around simplification of his product. He eventually simplifies his product and then simplifies the figures out how to simplify the manufacturing process later reminding me of da vinci's uh probably most famous quote simplicity is the ultimate sophistication he always meaning colt believed that single action guns were simpler to make and easier to handle and thus superior now we've reached the fateful moment his first business fails after four strained and fitful years the company collapsed collapsed over the spring and summer of 1841. The end was as ugly as the beginning had been hopeful.

Now, here's the remarkable thing. I'm going to focus on Sam's revolver business. He leaves the gun business completely. And if it wasn't for the other cultural events that are happening at this point, we may have never went back to it. He tries to develop underwater exploding mines he he tries to when the mine thing doesn't work out that business doesn't succeed either he decides he's going to be an agent to lay telegraph wire that doesn't work

out he is pulled back into the revolver business so that's where we're going to get here the one bright market after being rejected by the u.S. military. This is what the note I left myself. Texas remained the one bright spot. Remember, they said, the author said, you know, this is not back into the United States, but they're a barrier. So they're out there fighting Mexico and they're fighting Native Americans. And this is guerrilla warfare, which is exactly what the revolver is essentially made for. Again, it wasn't intentional by Colt, but that's winds up being, the people engaging guerrilla warfare realize, hey, this is a superior weapon. So they're going to pull the product. Remember, Mark Andreessen, Founders Number 50 says, you know, his his saying a lot of people disagree with. He says, what's more most important to a company's overall success? Right. Is it product? Is a team or is a market? And I love what he does. I think I talked on the podcast, but if not, go read. You can download his e-book for free. It's in the link. I left a link on Founders Number 50. I'm pretty sure you can grab it. But he's like, he lays out what he does perfectly. He lays out the argument. Why? Okay. Why do people say people? Why do people say product? And then he says, then he reveals what he believes. He's like, it's the market. Even if you're in a great market, the market will pull the product out of you. If you have an okay

team and an okay product, but a great market, you're going to beat a great're in a great market, the market will pull the product out of you. If you have an okay team and an okay product, but a great market, you're going to beat a great team and a great product in a shitty market. It's a very interesting counterintuitive point that I've never forgotten. Sam Colt, the successful revolver, undoubtedly came from the market. Obviously came because this guy doesn't give up. He's relentless and everything else. But the market definitely pulled this product out of him. Why Colt struggled to sell to the rest of the world the rest of the world on his guns texans needed no convincing

as a wild place i read a book uh listen to the audible version a few months back if you wanted to see this texans are also fighting the comanches comanches were very similar to gang as con and the mongols where they were very, very sophisticated. Their weapon, their technology is being the best horse riders around plus combining that skill with archery, bows and arrows. By the one, if you're using like a musket

at the time, by the time you can shoot off one, you can shoot one bullet, right? Then you have to do the whole reloading process. They could, the Comanches just like the Mongols, could unleash 20 arrows from their quiver. So the revolver is going to change. It's going to put the balance of this war

that the Texans and eventually the American settlers moving west were losing every engagement and now they start to win. And so while Coates struggled to sell the rest of the world on his guns, Texas needed no convincing. The lesson here is you struggled to sell the rest of the world on his guns, Texas needed no convincing.

The lesson here is you find the people who already understand the problem your product solves. They see it. Yep, I need to have it. They don't need to read your marketing. You're advertising nothing. They intuitively understand it. I'm running over my own point here.

They instinctively grasped that repeating arms were well matched to their hostile land. I'm going to go into more of that. So in that book that I read, The Empire of the Summer Moon, it tells the same story that's taking place in this book, but it's from the perspective of the Comanches. It's very fascinating if you're interested in early American history around this time, especially history of the West. I love the book. I couldn't recommend it enough. But in that book, I was introduced to this guy named Jack Hayes. Interesting enough, Jack Hayes is the first person to truly understand how revolutionary Colt's invention was. And now also interesting to note, at this time, Colt's company's already out of business. He was working on underwater exploding mines. What I mean is he was pulled back into the business.

Jack Hayes was probably the first person to grasp the true potential of a colt revolver though it had not occurred to anyone before uh that it had not occurred to anyone before is because no americans had been in that kind of in the kind of fights that hayes and his man men engaged in routinely this is the texas rangers hayes understood that despite its many imperfection it was hard to load load, easy to break, prone to misfire. The revolver was the most perfect tool for mounted horsemen that had ever existed, and especially for mounted Texas Rangers facing Comanches. Now, this next part is a demonstration of what you and I always talk about, that history does not repeat, human nature does. This is a very, I'm going to read you two quotes. I mean, you know, let me read the two quotes from Sam first, and i'll tell you my interpretation of it i would not have made it known meaning my revolver did i

not think it would put a stop to war second quote the good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemakers this is a very common mistake among weapon makers let's talk about the specific before we talk about the general. Weapon makers always assume that their invention would end war. You have Colt talking about this with his gun. Hiram Maxim with the machine gun says the same thing. Alfred Nobel, who invents dynamite, said the same thing. Scientists working on the creation of nuclear weapons said it would end war.

You had the Wright brothers that were, I think it was the Wright brothers, right around the time, I can't remember if it was said by them or somebody that was responding to their invention, that now because the airplane was such a marvelous invention that, of course, there's going to be no need for war. It's going to end war. So this, again, this is not really, when I see the really smart people making the same mistake over and over again, it's really, and they don't know each other. They're many times in different industries, different countries. It's just something in our nature that causes us to misinterpret this. This is not, now that's the specific. In the general, we also see this over and over again with

entrepreneurs not understanding how their products are eventually used. Thomas Edison, when he invented the phonograph, what did he say that he thought it was going to be used as remember the phonograph is really a precursor to what we're doing here it's like he thought the phonograph would be used to store an audio library of religious sermons so you record uh your favorite preacher whatever the case is you record all of them you people come to your house just like people have wine sellers no here's my audio library my my audio. You want to sit down and listen to this preacher talk, you know, Oh, this is, this is a sermon he gave, you know, two years ago. Let's sit in here and listen to it. That's literally what he thought was going to be the

primary, uh, the primary, uh, use of the phonograph. And I think the main takeaway there is just, it's unpredictable. We have no idea how these things are going to be used into the future now before i go back to him being pulled back into the business and this is you know this takes place over a decade he writes a letter to his younger brother sam is 32 years old this time and we get to know how he thought by reading this i'm it's a longer letter i'm just going to pull out some highlights okay uh this is the author giving us a preface before the letter call had turned 32 days before taking up his pen to respond to William. He's still a young man, but he had been living on his own for 15 years. Many of those years had been spent in increasingly frustrating campaigns to win government funding for his adventures.

Remember, he's broke at this time. He's had almost a decade of nothing but failure. Here's a couple highlights from the letter. Why not aspire to something higher? There is the same wide range for talent there has always been. Select the object of your ambition and reach its zenith of your hope or die in the attempt. This is an extreme character. Every single person that we talk about in this podcast is extreme. Sam Colt is very extreme. Life is a thing to be enjoyed.

Make up your mind determinedly what station in life you will reach and rely upon it with proper exertion and you will not be thwarted. Your great study should be of man. He continues on that theme right there. Lose no opportunity to mingle with the mass and view nature in its most primitive state. Now this is what I mean about he's a very extreme person. This is the last thing he says to his brother. And I love the author's interpretation of Sam's letter. The anger and frustration was real, and his desire to be his own master and master of others was sincere. So I mentioned a few times that a lot of these events, these historical events have, Sam has no control over, but he benefits from. And one of them is President Polk is, he's had a large, he had a large influence on Colt's business. And it's because Polk is one of the first presidents to really extend this idea of manifest destiny, which was a huge cultural

theme at this point. This is like the 1840s is where we're around where we are in history and he's going to say okay it's americans destiny we're going to conquer everything in sight from c to c is going to be and again this is not what america was at the time i think it was only uh in sam's lifetime its population tripled i think went from like i want to say like 10 million to 30 million or maybe like 13 million to 40, something like that. And President Polk laid it out. He's like, all of this is going to be ours and we're going to take it by force. Polk laid out a design so grand that it seemed to come from a mind not of a technocrat, but of a prophet or a madman. His real subject that he wanted to talk about the territorial expansion

of the united states in february congress had voted to annex texas so this was already a foregone conclusion but texas for polk was just the beginning he wanted oregon in california too despite the fact that oregon was partly a british possession at the time and california was entirely a mexican possession so what's happening this is this theme that we see over and over again um let me read that you know let me read the paragraph for you and then i'll give you my my interpretation colt colts meaning um his revolver played a small but important role in the mexican war uh this is the mexican american war in the late 1840s the war put colt on the path to riches and accompanied gold rushers to California in 1849.

So they're talking about two use cases. There's a gigantic war. There's revolvers being used in. And also you have this huge flood of people going from east to west when the gold rush happens. And why is that important? Because there's a ton of people doing this and his product is indispensable to them. It says, becoming as indispensable to western settlers as shovels picks and boots next to a bible a colt revolver was the best travel insurance available they would

make these like small um how would you describe them like if you want to visit a city they would have like travel guides well they had travel guides for the people heading west and in the travel guides they say hey not only would they tell you to buy a colt they tell you where to keep it that you needed a moment's notice. They would talk about all the people using it to protect themselves. Obviously, you can use it to protect yourself, but you can also use it not just in defensive, but in offensive positions as well. 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. So in a gold rush, don't dig for gold, you sell pickaxes.

And in this, when the American frontier is still unknown, they consider his product to be indispensable. They will absolutely spend money on it. They have to, from their perspective. Now, what's so interesting is right before this happens, we see more writing from Sam. This is a description by Sam colt of his previous decade i have spent the last 10 years of my life without profit in perfecting military inventions how many people are willing to work this hard and not give

up after a decade a decade so jack hayes is the first the texas rangers first one to realize how valuable they are sam walker is going to, not only does he understand how valuable they are, he's also fighting Texas, but he's a really valuable his guns have been in Texas and other battles out West. He's eventually going to say the same thing to the the the politicians that are in charge of buying the weapons. But first, he's going to give Sam Colt some helpful ideas on ways to improve his his weapon. It was a glowing review, but it contained what could have been read as a veiled criticism of the gun. Colt instead decided to read it as a proposition. With improvements, I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for light-mounted troops. This exchange initiated one of the most remarkable relationships in the history of American manufacturing.

On one hand, a brash Easterner who had spent much of his life in hotels and factories and offices that obviously being cult and on the other hand a laconic Westerner whose deeds spoke louder than his words and whose life had passed mostly outdoors under the open sky between these two Sams lay a country that was about to change in ways neither could have anticipated that's a great one sentence summary of what I keep trying to repeat to you is that sam was benefit he could not control a lot of these um these situations that are occurring but he benefited from them between these two sams lay a country that was about to change in ways neither could have anticipated yet both would have plenty to say about how that happened walker was instrumental absolutely instrumental in putting colt back in the gun business. In January of 1847, Sam Colt and Sam Walker finalized a deal for the immediate construction of a thousand revolvers. The

Secretary of War, this guy named William Marcy, endorsed the contract on January 6th. This is such an important part. Walker had done a great deal for Colt in the weeks since they began exchanging letters. Most importantly, he had single-handedly persuaded the Ordnance Department to contravene its long-standing objection to Colt's pistols. The opinions of the famous Captain Walker, he was one of the most famous people in the country at the time, carried undeniable weight in Washington. He had achieved in a few weeks what Colt had failed to achieve in years. And what was the result? Colt was suddenly back in the gun business. Now, I was reading this section. I was like, OK, wait a minute.

How do you jump back in the gun business? But you don't know how to. You just signed his contract. You don't know how to make the product. How are you going to make a thousand of them? And so we're going to this section is going to is going to answer that question for us. First, though, Colt had to make the guns. He had promised to deliver the first hundred within three months so that Walker could take the batch back with him to Mexico. This would have been a tall order even if Colt had a

factory already spitting out pistols by the dozens. As matters stood, he had no factory, no machinery, and no men. But you know what he has? He has a brain and he knows how to learn from past failures. So this is the one way he solves the problem. And to know that myself, shouldn't have they done this

the first time instead of building a factory from scratch. If you remember that for early days of Tesla, when they were building the Roadster, they didn't build everything from scratch. I think Lotus is the one that made the chassis, right? The vast majority of the car was built by somebody else. Sam Colt's doing the same thing. Within days of meeting Walker, Colt had approached Eli Whitney Jr. So Eli Whitney, not only did he invent a bunch of things, but he also had an armory. The 27-year-old son of the late cotton gin inventor and gun manufacturer, he's meeting with him to discuss having pistols made at the Whitney Armory. Yes, start out slow. Then when you have the demand and you have a product that works, then build your own factory. Don't do it in reverse, Sam. And he realizes, I'm not going to do that again. And he also doesn't have as much money and he wants to retain control this time too so he's got to be smart about how he does things eli jr may have lacked his father's genius for invention but he ran a profitable armory he was manufacturing serviceable if uninspired muskets by the thousands for the u.s army so he agrees to do that and that's how he starts fulfilling his first few orders uh he's also another we get more insight into the

relentlessness of Sam Colt. He asked everybody he knew, everybody he ran into for money this time, even people who lost a lot on his previous endeavors. People not only gave him money for the first failed gun business, the second business, the exploding mines he raised money for. So he goes back to this guy named Selden. Selden again declined. Having lost some $10,000 in Colt's first gun business and having then been paid in worthless submarine battery stock, he was understandably reluctant to get

embroiled in another costly Colt debacle. How could he know that this scheme was the one that was going to make Colt rich? This is more on learning from previous failures. The greatest mistake of his past, Colt believed, had been ceding control of his business to others and he did not intend to repeat it. The new enterprise was to be a company but not a corporation. And again, it's not corporations as we think about them.

It's the corporations of the 1840s. There would be no charter, no stock sale, and no one to tell him what to do. Direct quote from Sam here. I am working on my own hook and have sole control and management of my business. No longer subject to the whims of a pack of damn fools styling themselves as a board of directors. And another thing that Sam does is really, really smart. When he starts to build his own factory, he he's going to have essentially unlimited demand for his product he recruits one of the most important people in u.s manufacturing history his name is elijah root

and sometimes the lesson here is really sometimes you can recruit people by framing it as a larger challenge than their current work so think about steve jobs recruiting john scully says hey do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come build Apple? He had been offered lucrative and important jobs in the past by the Springfield Armory and the U.S. Mint, among others. But it turned them all down. Colt told Root to name his salary, but better yet, Colt offered him an opportunity to re-envision machine production at a far grander and more complex scale than he'd ever find in any other factory. So that's how he gets them. Now, why is that important?

Why is Elijah Root so important? As one early 20th century historian wrote, the credit for the revolver belongs to Colt for the way they were made mainly to root and so this is where they take what they call the American system which is again the very early version of what is going to become the assembly line that is used by Henry Ford we just saw it was used by Milton Hershey just over and over again they're going to make the process as simple as possible so on one end of the factory comes in your raw materials on the end of the factory your finished product before we get into the other end of the factory, your finished product. Before we get into how Sam thinks about his factory and why it's so important, I want to talk about his father dying. And just as I read this section to you, just imagine the agony. He found his father in poor health that January.

Christopher Colt was now 69 years old and had been failing for some time. Even by the standards of his age, when no life was spared hardship, Christopher had endured a great deal. He had lost his first wife and five of his children by her, including most infamously John. John's the brother that killed the person. I didn't go into detail, but it was national news. Edgar Allan Poe did a story on it because he put the guy in a box and tried to ship him off and it was just it was one of the most famous news stories of the time so he had to not only do you realize that your son did something like that but then you have to his son instead of being hung might have killing himself in jail you know just just devastating from from a parental perspective i couldn't imagine that both of his children by ol, that was his second wife, were dead now too. So that's seven kids. Seven of his ten ones are dead, right? Another son, his namesake, Chris Jr.,

was dissolute and ill. He's going to die very shortly after, but not before his father dies. That left him with two healthy children. James was now a judge in St. Louis. Sam was famous and on the cusp of extraordinary wealth. Such was the tally when Christopher died in 1850. America was 74 years old. So back to the gun business. He's got demand all over. He's got demand in America. He's selling weapons in Russia, Europe, everywhere.

And so that's where he gets the money to build this gigantic machine. And the summary of the section is, the machine that makes the machine is just as important. It took a while for Colt to warm to the true subject of his talk, which was not guns, but machines. He wanted his audience to understand that his machines and his production methods were every bit as significant, as revolutionary as his revolver. After chiding the English for continuing to make guns largely by hand, he had introduced his audience to what would soon come to be known as the American system of manufacturing. Direct quote from Colt here.

In America, where manual labor is scarce and expensive, it was imperative to devise means for producing these arms with the greatest rapidity and economy. Machines required less labor, saved costs, and perhaps most important of all, helped achieve uniformity. Four-fifths of the work at Colt's factory was now performed by machines, he told his audience. He had broken his down, and again, this section right here, the last part of this is really how he approached everything,

and I think it's universally applicable to whatever it is we're doing. He had broken his gun down into the fewest possible parts, then replicated each of these parts by a machine dedicated to it alone by this system the machines become almost automatons famous british engineer james nasmyth visits sam's colts factory this is what he says he had an almost religious awakening as he absorbed the spirit that pervaded the machines here's the bullet i'm just gonna give you the bullet points of what he said. He saw a common sense way of going to a point at once. A great simplicity. Almost a Quaker-like rigidity of form.

No ornamentation. But the precise, accurate, and correct results. So something that leads to his early death is the fact that he uh he was always in poor health he what he was working from the time he opened his eyes in the morning to the time he closed them he pushed himself extremely hard he was on the move constantly they called it chaos is the way you would describe it um and he drank and ate with reckless abandon he dies they think it's rheumatoid arthritis or some kind of gout. But they thought it might be like a secondary infection

that's also caused by a compromised immune system because there's like some swelling that's going on in his brain and I think it's something with his intestines as well. But the reason I'm going to get to there in a minute just so you know where the story ends

but we also see that to the note myself, is he's making it rain. When he's gotten his first taste of success at 21, Colt had indulged himself in all the money he could buy and soon landed himself in debt. Now at 37, he was coming into real wealth, splendid and sustained wealth, and his indulgences hurried to keep pace with his income. He spent a ton of money on cigars and alcohol um and food really uh to give you an idea of how wild he was he's accused of bribing officials to extend his patent he definitely did that by the way um and he's called to testify

it's just one sentence more surprising to the committee than Colt's memory lapses was that he was obviously drunk as he testified. Imagine being called, imagine a leader of one of America's biggest companies now being called to testify in Congress, which happens from time to time. We've seen recently, right? And they show up drunk. I mean, this is a wild, I love studying this part of history because these are just wild people. They're very extreme people. I just find it very not only is there a lot to learn from them, but just amusing to read about them. I just could not imagine.

Just could not imagine that happening in present day, I guess, is my point. This next section, there's a great line in James Dyson's autobiography. And he says one good editorial is worth a thousand advertisements which is really helpful when james was building his company right colt we see that with colt too colt was not only his was he one of the most famous people in america at this time but his product was talked about constantly because of all the things that were occurring in the country at this time colt continued to hold a virtue monopoly on revolvers in the united states his patents eventually going to expire but hasn't expired yet he also enjoyed the kind of market penetration and

brand recognition that few, if any other American products had ever known. If not quite staple items in American households, Colt revolvers were a staple of American newspaper coverage. They were featured almost daily in gripping stories of murders, suicides, accidents, adulterous affairs, robberies, and duels. Many revolver stories began with an act of villainy by one party or another, but often featured brave and worthy gunmen who wielded a weapon to punish scoundrels. Sam Colt also did what you and I are doing right now. He learned from previous great people who are reading biographies. One of the books that he picked up around this time was a three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson.

More on this idea that he possessed, like we all do, gifts and curses. Colt's greatest strength as an entrepreneur was his perseverance and tenacity. They were also his greatest weaknesses. He did not know how to concede an unwinnable fight. What they're talking about there is he got himself into trouble trying to bribe officials and kept spending a lot of time money and treasure on extending his patent he extended it once or twice but eventually this they refused to do it especially after he was still trying to bribe officials after he'd been accused of bribing officials and so like no we're not going to do

this you're going to get us in trouble everybody knows what you're doing. And something to know about him. This is his father-in-law. This is right before he dies too. Productivity was his nature. And just good writing from, great writing from the author here. As it is the function of a boiler to convert water into steam.

It was the nature of Colt to convert his time, his waking hours, and space into profit to improve every minute as his yankee mantra went that's direct quote from him he could not ride from his house to his armory without stopping off at his fish pond to consider how to tweak his trout population or walk across his back lawn without deciding the time had come to drill an artisan well or plant a thousand pear trees he had a weakness for drink and was sick much of the time now come to drill an artisan well or plant a thousand pear trees he had a

weakness for drink and was sick much of the time now what's crazy is his sickness before it kills him it this is you're talking about maybe half a decade and he's just pushing through even to the detriment of his health um he had a weakness for drink and was sick much of the time now but he was metabolically wired for productivity. He was singularly blessed and cursed. There's those words again in these last years of his life. The richer he grew, the sicker he became. And then you have the beginning of the Civil War, which causes the demand for his. He dies right at the beginning of the Civil War when the demand for his product was never higher.

This is his schedule right before he dies. This is his father-in-law writing. He is without exception the hardest working man I know of. He generally rises at five or six o'clock in the morning and takes a ride across the river to see his garden, his farm, and his brick making. Then he returns to get his breakfast and goes to his armory where he remains off until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. He must love work for its own sake, I think, and it really seems that the more he has to do, the more he enjoys himself. And so he passes away at 47 years old at home. And I'll close on this. Colt's life was intense.

His mind ever on the strain. His brain teeming with plans and hopes and enterprises. But Colt had made the most of what life gave him. He died a middle-aged man, but he had really lived far longer than those who vegetate to a more protracted period. Colt died no more tamely than he lived. His biggest idea was making the world aware that he was in it. For the full story, buy the book using the link that's in your show notes or go to founderspodcast.com

and you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That's 147 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.