The concept of the assembly line was first proposed in writing in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776. The Scottish social philosopher and political economist initially discussed this approach to the division of labour in relation to the manufacture of pins. This was also the year of the American Revolution. Sixty years later Samuel Colt put the concept of assembly line manufacture using interchangeable parts into explosive action. On the 5th March 1836, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Patterson, New Jersey gained its charter. Samuel Colt was 22 years old in 1836.
In 1835, aged 21, Samuel Colt travelled to England, following in the footsteps of Elisha Collier, a Bostonian who had patented a revolving flintlock there that achieved great popularity. Despite the reluctance of English officials to issue a patent to Colt, no fault could be found with the gun and he was issued his first patent (Number 6909). Upon his return to America, he applied for his US patent for a "revolving gun"; he was granted the patent on 25th February, 1836 (later numbered 9430X). This instrument and patent No. 1304, dated 29th August, 1836, protected the basic principles of his revolving-breech loading, folding trigger firearm named the Colt Paterson.
With a loan from his cousin, Dudley Selden, and letters of recommendation from Ellsworth, Colt formed a corporation of venture capitalists in April 1836 to bring his idea to market. Through the political connections of these venture capitalists, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey, was chartered by the New Jersey legislature on 5th March, 1836. Colt was given a commission for each gun sold in exchange for his share of patent rights, and stipulated the return of the rights if the company disbanded.
Colt never claimed to have invented the revolver; his design was a more practical adaption of Collier's earlier revolving flintlock incorporating a locking pawl to keep the cylinder in line with the barrel. The invention of the percussion cap made ignition more reliable, faster, and safer than the older flintlock design. Colt's great contribution was to the use of interchangeable parts. Knowing that some gun parts were made by machine, he envisioned that all the parts on every Colt gun to be interchangeable and made by machine, later to be assembled by hand. His goal was the assembly line. This is shown in an 1836 letter that Colt wrote to his father in which he said,
“The first workman would receive two or three of the most important parts and would affix these and pass them on to the next who add a part and pass the growing article on to another who would do the same, and so on until the complete arm is put together.”
Colt's US revolver patent gave him a monopoly on revolver manufacture until 1857. His was the first practical revolver and the first practical repeating firearm due to progress made in percussion technology. No longer a mere novelty arm, the revolver became an industrial and cultural legacy as well as a contribution to the development of war technology, ironically personified in the name of one of his company's later innovations, the "Peacemaker".
Although this first venture into capitalism was not a great success - by the end of 1837 the Paterson Arms Company had made over 1,000 weapons, but there were no sales – he did eventually succeed and by the end of his life his net worth was in the region of $15 million.
Samuel Colt was born in Hartford, Connecticut. The narrator of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is called Harry Morgan a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut Describe as a man familiar with the firearms and machinery trade.
It is a curious conceit that Twain, who once remarked to a group of labour unionists “Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat”, should choose a capitalist such as Samuel Colt, as a model for his narrator of a work which is effectively the very exposition of the above remark. On reflection, one notes that George Bernard Shaw, a renowned socialist, had his arms dealer Andrew Undershaft as a model of acceptable (?) capitalist.
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