Moreover, his innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements, and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer in advertising, product placement, and mass marketing.

[3] In 1829, at the age of 15, Colt began working in his father's textile plant in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had access to tools, materials, and the factory workers' expertise.

As ticket sales declined, Colt realized that "serious" museum lectures were not what the people wanted to pay for; it was dramatic stories of salvation and redemption the public craved.

[11] His public speaking skills were so prized that he was thought to be a doctor and was pressed into service to cure an apparent cholera epidemic aboard a riverboat by giving stricken passengers a dose of nitrous oxide.

[11] Having saved some money and still wanting to be considered an inventor as opposed to a "medicine man", Colt made arrangements to begin building guns using proper gunsmiths from Baltimore, Maryland.

[12] Colt's trip to the United Kingdom had been preceded by a similar visit by Elisha Collier, a Bostonian who had patented a revolving flintlock there that achieved great popularity.

[14] This instrument and patent number 1304, dated August 29, 1836, protected the basic principles of his revolving-breech loading, folding trigger firearm named the Colt Paterson.

[15][16] With a loan from his cousin Dudley Selden and letters of recommendation from Ellsworth, Colt formed a corporation of venture capitalists in 1836 to bring his idea to market.

No longer a mere novelty weapon, the revolver became an industrial and cultural legacy, as well as a contribution to the development of war technology, ironically signified in the name of one of his company's later innovations, the "Peacemaker".

The soldiers in Florida praised the new weapon, but the unusual hammerless design, sixty years ahead of its time, made it difficult to train men who were used to exposed-hammer guns.

In late 1843, after the loss of payment for the Florida pistols, the Paterson plant closed and a public auction was held in New York City to sell the company's most liquid assets.

[28] As tensions with the British grew toward the end of 1841, Colt demonstrated his underwater mines to the US government, prompting Congress to appropriate funds for his project.

However, opposition from John Quincy Adams, who was serving as a US Representative from Massachusetts's 8th congressional district, scuttled the project as "not fair and honest warfare", calling the Colt mine an "unchristian contraption".

His preoccupation with patent infringement suits slowed his own company's transition to the cartridge system and prevented other firms from pursuing revolver designs.

At the same time, Colt's policies forced some competing inventors to greater innovation by denying them key features of his mechanism; as a result, they created their own.

From his experience in haggling with government officials, he knew what numbers he would have to generate to make enough profit to invest money in improving his machinery, thereby limiting imitators' ability to produce a comparable weapon at a lower price.

Although successful at this, for the most part, his preoccupation with marketing strategies and patent protection caused him to miss a great opportunity in firearms development when he dismissed an idea from one of his gunsmiths, Rollin White.

Root had been successful in an earlier venture automating the production of axes and made, bought, or improved jigs, fixtures and profile machinery for Colt.

Colt hired artisan gun makers from Bavaria and developed a commercial use for Waterman Ormsby's grammagraph to produce "roll-die" engraving on steel, particularly on the cylinders.

He organized a large display of his firearms at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Hyde Park, London and ingratiated himself by presenting cased engraved Colt revolvers to such appropriate officials as Britain's Master General of the Ordnance.

As the world's leading proponent of mass production techniques, Colt delivered a lecture concerning the subject to the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in London.

[53] With help from ICE secretary Charles Manby[54] Colt established his London operation near Vauxhall Bridge on the River Thames and began production on January 1, 1853.

He frequently gave custom engraved versions of his revolvers to heads of state, military officers, and celebrities such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and Hungarian rebel Lajos Kossuth.

[45] One of Colt's more significant acts of self-promotion was a $1,120 payment ($61,439 in 1999 dollars) to the publishers of United States Magazine for a 29-page fully illustrated story showing the inner workings of his factory.

He went so far as to hire agents in other states and territories to find such samples, to buy hundreds of copies for himself and to give the editor a free revolver for writing them, particularly if such a story disparaged his competition.

[60] He used the press to his own advantage by giving revolvers to editors, prompting them to report "all the accidents that occur to the Sharps & other humbug arms", and listing incidents where Colt weapons had been "well used against bears, Indians, Mexicans, etc".

[76] Colt's firearms did not always fare well in standardized military tests; he preferred written testimonials from individual soldiers who used his weapons and these were what he most relied on to secure government contracts.

When he opened the London armory, he posted a 14-foot sign on the roof across from Parliament reading: "Colonel Colt's Pistol Factory" as a publicity stunt, which created a stir in the British press.

[79] Colt established libraries and educational programs within his armories for his employees, which provided training for several generations of toolmakers and other machinists, who had great influence on other manufacturing efforts over the next half century.

[80] Prominent examples included Francis A. Pratt, Amos Whitney, Henry Leland, Edward Bullard, Worcester R. Warner, Charles Brinckerhoff Richards, William Mason and Ambrose Swasey.