Clash of the Titans - Shooting Away
Clash of the Titans - Shooting Away
Samuel Colt and Daniel Wesson were innovators and competitors. Here is a tale of another innovation battle determined by patents
Although America had declared Independence in 1776, it was not a stable nation at the time. The men who signed the declaration were being hunted by the British in the immediate aftermath of the signing. There would be many more skirmishes with the British and one with itself (civil war) before the country assumed a degree of stability.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, Samuel Colt was not born into a household of means. Incidentally, it was in 1814 that the British forces entered Washington DC and torched the White House as well as the Capitol. Samuel Colt was a month old.
At 11, he was indentured to a farmer where he performed chores and got his education. When he turned 15, he moved to Massachusetts to work with his father at a textile mill. After a fire at the mill, his father sent him on a Voyage to Calcutta to learn the seaman’s trade. It was on this voyage that he had the idea of creating a revolver. A gun that could fire several shots without the need to reload.
Two years later, he returned to America and went back to working at the textile mills. At the same time, he started designing his gun and with some money from his father, he started fabricating the models. While the first few models failed, he did not give up on his idea. He saved up money and decided to get started in the business of making guns. With further refinement to his design and working with a gunsmith called Pearson, he designed the Revolver. He applied for a patent in 1835 and was granted the Patent first in the UK and then in the USA.
Colt had invented the revolver in a world that was dominated by single-barrel muskets. His first test with the army did not go too well at first. Traditionally, you would pour gunpowder into the barrel and then load the lead. Once the trigger was pulled the gunpowder ignited and the shot fired. Putting 5 such barrels together sometimes resulted in multiple barrels firing causing an explosion.
Colt innovated relentlessly to overcome this problem but by the time he had perfected the solution his company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
It was the late 1830s and a country called the Republic of Texas was at war with Mexico. Samuel Hamilton Walker was an officer of the Republic and served as a Texas Ranger. Walker and the Texas Rangers had been fighting wars with their muskets but reloading them took time. In search of battlefield superiority, he got in touch with Colt and placed a sizable order for the revolvers.
It was on the insistence of Walker that Colt added a sixth chamber to the revolver which was initially designed with only 5 chambers.
Colt was not in a position to manufacture the order for 10,000 revolvers all by himself and approached several gun manufacturers to manufacture specific parts for the gun. Perhaps one of the first to outsource parts to OEMs, he was able to deliver.
Business took off!
One of the manufacturers who had been approached was a company run by Edwin Wesson.
Around the time that Colt was filing his patent, Daniel Wesson started to work with his elder brother Edwin Wesson at his factory that produced muskets and rifles. He looked at the double-barrelled rifles and thought it could be pushed further. When he received news of the launch of the Colt he was disappointed since he had been working on a similar prototype. Nevertheless, he continued to innovate.
When he attempted to bring his product to the market in the 1940s, Colt approached the court with his patent and forced the Wessons to cease manufacture.
Daniel decided to continue to work on his innovations. As mentioned gunpowder was still being poured into the barrels even though the revolvers had many more shots. Daniel suggested that if the gunpowder and the shot could be wrapped into a metal casing such that a pin triggered the gunpowder when fired, re-loading a gun would become far easier.
A bullet was born.
He took his idea to Colt and suggested he could design his guns to work with the bullets. At the time Colt was selling a large number of revolvers and also the American Civil War was around the corner. He had been despatching large consignments to the South and did not want to take any risk with the design at that stage.
Daniel Wesson had seen nothing but a string of failures in bringing his innovations to the market. He could not sell his guns, the only person selling all the guns did not want to use his bullets. He had lost his brother Edwin to health issues and was lost for direction.
At this time, he met Horace Smith who was making Whaling Guns. Both of them were interested in guns that would be used without the need to reload and started working on a repeating rifle. A rifle that was fed bullets through a cartridge. This would go on to become the machine gun.
Smith developed the cartridge design which he named the Volcanic Cartridge. To commercialise this product they founded a company that was renamed Volcanic Repeating Arms. The company was financed by Oliver Winchester. Fed up with Winchester the two of them quit. Winchester would make a lot of wealth on the back of this company and rename the company the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
They founded a company that would commercialise a revolver that used cartridges and called their company Smith and Wesson. They innovated relentlessly with interchangeable parts, revolving magazines, and many such novelties that they brought to the market.
At the age of 65 Smith sold his interests in the company to Wesson and retired. Wesson remained active in the firm till his death in 1906.
In the meantime, Connecticut-based Colt got embroiled in controversy over his gun sales to the South. He was under tremendous pressure to clear his name and even raised a militia that he said would fight the South. In 1862, during the Civil War, he passed away due to gout.
His wife, Elizabeth Colt decided to continue running the business after this death. They suffered a factory fire that destroyed everything but she did not relent. She brought the company back from the dead and Colt Manufacturing continues to sell guns today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Smith_(inventor)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Colt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_B._Wesson