Book Review: Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter that Changed America (2020). Jim Rasenberger.

This book was a bit slow and academic in style as popular biographies go, but had a very iconic American mid-nineteenth century historical figure as its subject. Of course, everyone has heard about Samuel Colt, his invention of the Colt revolver, and the old line about “God made men, but it took Colonel Colt to make them equal”. But there is a great deal more to Colt’s story.

Colt spent decades trying to invent things, frequently impressing people with his ambition and his inventing skills, but constantly being short of money, and continuing to tinker with his revolver design over many years, before he was finally able to convince the U.S. government to start buying it.

He is considered to be the real father of industrial mass production, which he created by building his own factories for gun manufacture. He survived several scandals, including the notorious trial of one of his brothers for murdering a young woman, and only saw his fortunes finally take off as a result of the Union’s industrial build-up for the Civil War.

By the time he died, he was presiding like a lord over his own “company town” in Connecticut, filled not only with the factories where his guns were made, but also the planned housing of his employees, for whom he had the same sort of godlike status as a modern-day Gates, Jobs or Zuckerberg.

Revolver is an interesting account of a controversial American industrialist, inventor and public figure, and the mid-nineteenth century American society in which he lived. It also gives some important historical context to how lethal modern repeating firearms were first developed and marketed to American society, culture and the government, long before our era of the NRA-supported gun industry, high-capacity pistols and military-style assault rifles. Recommended.