REVOLVER

Vigorous life of Samuel Colt (1814-1862), the renowned and controversial inventor of the pistol that bears his name today.

Colt was a young teenager when he shipped out to sea, where he had one of those lightbulb moments—or would have, if there had been lightbulbs in 1831. He probably owed it to something he’d seen in a market in India, but there it was: a model he’d carved of a pistol that, unlike the single-load models of the day, had a “fist-shaped bulge above the trigger” inside of which could be found the solution to a nagging technological problem: how to fire several bullets without reloading. With Colt’s invention, by popular historian and journalist Rasenberger’s account, two great forces met, one economic and the other demographic. Here was an invention more important than the mechanical reaper or cotton gin, one that, with all its murderous possibilities, gave specific force to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the continent. Colt seems to have had some inkling of all this since he fought relentlessly to preserve his patents, including using a pioneering campaign of lobbying “where congressmen were wined and dined and flirted with by attractive women who, sooner or later, whispered into their ears about the benefits of Colt’s patent extension.” Himself a carouser of indifferent morals, Colt made and lost a fortune or two over the years. He died near the beginning of the Civil War, in which his “revolver was a sideshow…a desirable but inessential accoutrement carried by officers and cavalry”—but especially by guerrillas such as Quantrill’s Raiders and the gang of the Confederate bushwhacker Bloody Bill Anderson, who used Colt’s invention to slaughter Union troops equipped with single-shot muskets. As Rasenberger notes in conclusion, knowing all this about Colt won’t change anyone’s mind about guns, but his useful study certainly lends depth to the ongoing debate about them.

A solid blend of technological, economic, social, and popular history.