#147 Sam Colt

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. 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, are the letters of women with whom he shared his bed, which have mostly, though not entirely, been cold 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, desperadoes, 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.