YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Colt

lines on the record
19
first
2020-10-05
most recent
2020-10-05
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “factory's not up and running, but Colt has already gone through all of his money. He's now deeply in debt. At a time when a skilled tradesman would do well to earn $600 a year, $6,000 was an extraordinary sum. That's his salary from the company started. $6,000 was an extraordinary sum for a young man with only himself to support. So how did he go broke? He's making 10 times what a skilled tradesman would make at this time. He's spending money in an expensive hotels, clothes, and alcohol. This is not very different to what Felix Dennis told us in that book, How to Get Rich. He blew $100 million in a decade this way. And at this point in his life, he's also assuming, he's like, okay, everybody loves my product. Of course I'm going to figure out how to manufacture it. Of course, we're going to be successful. Of course, the Army is going to buy them by the thousands. No, they're not. Not at this point. He gets negative feedback from the ordinance department. I think it's called like the United States Ordinance Committee or Ordinance Department. It's the group.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Still not sure how to mass produce something that again previously was made by hand. Simply put, Colt had no guns to sell and would have none for months to come. Production had to wait for the completion of the gunmill, but construction was at least four months behind schedule. Not even the samples, the prototypes, the handmade prototypes, were available. They had served as models to impress investors and buyers, but now they were being used as templates to create machines, to create machine-made replicas. Adapting machines to copy the prototypes was far more difficult than he or anyone else had anticipated.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So not only is he spending a lot of money on his company, but he also spends something he's known for his entire life, is just spending so much money as soon as he gets money, he would spend it. The only thing that saves him is the fact that he's able to make so much money later on in life. The demand for his product is so great that it'd be almost impossible to spend money as fast as it was coming in. We're not there at this point, though. We're at a point where he's got a company that's not up and running. His income is eventually going to rely on the profits of that company. There are no profits yet. So as Colt spent like a young man who believed he was destined to be rich, and why not? Colt's guns were already drawing serious attention from distant parts of the world. According to Henry Ellsworth, that's the person in the patent office. to the patent office that the models on display had been completely worn out because they'd been handled so much. So people might have been interested, but he had no supply to give them.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Talk about over and over again, right? Your strengths can also be your greatest weaknesses. He would be one of this would be one of his greatest assets as he pushes his way through seemingly insurmountable challenges and oh my god, what this guy has to endure is insane. But also one of his most costly flaws. So you might be asking like, okay, if he's not paying you, he's lecturing you. He's a decade and a half, decade younger than you, why are you putting up with this? Cole was a master salesman. He could convince people to buy his products. He can convince people to come work for him. He could convince you to do what he wanted you to do. So he says, why would Pearson continue working for Colt who had proved himself completely unreliable as an employer?”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Both a decade or so older, they were established in serious family men who Colt had failed to pay as promise, so he's doing everything on a shoestring budget, which I'll talk about a lot. Yet Colt's response to them was to keep working and by the way, be sure the task was completed to his satisfaction before he returned. So what they're talking about, he's traveling, when he runs out of money, he's got to go back on the road to sell nitrous oxide hits, right? He's really slow to pay bills because he has no money. And they complain they're like, hey, you're behind on payments. He's like, yeah, okay, that's fine. Make sure the work's done as I need it. Better be like the quality. This is what I mean about being a bit of a shit. And this is where the author is going to go into. He had stunning confidence. He was right. Others were wrong. For the rest of his life, he would encounter the world on these terms. This would be one of his greatest assets. This is the gift and the curse.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Lives. He traveled, womanized, drank, smuggled guns to Russia. Okay, so he finds a really talented artisan. His name is Pearson. He's the one that's going to be doing a lot of the work for him. But the reason I'm bringing up this section is not so much to tell you about that. It's really to tell you about the personality of Sam Colt at 19. And these traits are, I don't think they ever go away. In fact, they probably get more pronounced as he progresses with age. He's stubborn. He's bold. He's determined. He's single-minded. And he's a bit of a shit. If you remember back, I think it was on Founders number 129, Felix Dennis wrote that book, How to Get Rich, which is one of the most recommended books for me to cover on the podcast. And in it, he talks about the traits that he feels are very helpful to for anybody trying to do something difficult, like building a company or otherwise. And, you know, a lot of those traits are determination single-minded. And he says, and there's a line in the Buccaneer Fred. He says, and being a bit of a shit helps. So he says, Colt was 19 years old. Pearson and Baxter, these are the people he's working with, were”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The story is in Albany. Albany was where Colt's efforts became intense and focused for a few possible reasons. He had saved enough on his travels to afford to spend large sums, and the city had a number of accomplished gunsmiths who could carry out the kinds of sophisticated detail work he required. So he would constantly, he'd have an idea, a prototype, he'd bring it to somebody, pay somebody to put his idea into practice, and then constantly work with them to do refinements. But he also has to be focused because he's not the only one. Again, this is a problem that a lot of people are attempting to solve. No one's doing it successfully. The first person to solve it and get the patent on it, which winds up being Colt, is going to be wealthy as a result of that. But it's not like, if you remember what I said in the introduction, he's rich at 21, poor at 31, rich at 41. His life is not at all like you expect. This idea, this business that he's building right now, is going to fail massively, right? He's going to be distracted.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Now, this is what he was doing while traveling. Colt was selling hits of nitrous oxide gas to fund the development of his gun. And the note I left myself on this page is, wait a minute. He's giving public demonstrations of laughing gas? I did not see that coming. Nitrous oxide had a lot to recommend it as a road-friendly elixir besides the relative, it was easy to transport. The gas combined the self-improving appeal of science, meaning coal began a lot of his demonstrations with a serious sounding lecture on chemistry. So he combines the improving appeal of science with the allure of spectacles. So he gave a lecture then after lecture is done, people come up, and if they wanted to expose themselves to laughing gas, they would do so. And his scheduled a time, he's extremely focused during the day. So his nights went to nitrous oxide days to improving his gun. Right now he's currently in the...”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Or what he does, I should say. He embarked on a journey, a tour of thousands of miles that would take him to nearly every city in the nation. As he joined a great human tide of peddlers and tinkers, some of the other people doing this, they were traveling dentists, fly-by-nate medicine man, fleet-footed lottery salesmen, foot loose dance instructors, and roaming preachers and nomadic portrait painters, and many, many more. We don't know exactly funny the nomadic portrait painter. That was a description of last week I talked to you about Milton Hershey. That's what his father did. Travel all over and he couldn't make money. He was a nomadic portrait painter. We don't know exactly where Colt went on his journey because he left no clear record of it, but he did drop enough clues, a receipt here, a newspaper notice there to let us form a picture not just of his life, but of the America he saw a nation brimming with industry and ingenuity and hope and at the same time anxiety, fear, and brutality.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Using a paw to push a ratchet, to turn a cylinder to fire a gun sounds like fairly basic applied mechanics. But in eighteen thirty one it was nothing less than revolutionary. So that's the first hint to the paradox that was Sam Colt, because he was undoubtedly wild, reckless, uncontrollable, but he was also a gifted inventor. And he set his mind to the constant improvement of not only his product, but then his life, his business, his factory. And we see this over and over again. I'll get there more in a little bit. So in the meantime, he survives this journey. He's like, I'm never doing that again. And he comes back to America. He has no money. He's got an idea, but he's got no money. So he decides to take off, and this is very common at the time in American history, and he's going to travel all over the country trying to make money. So I'm going to give you a little background on that. And then it's going to be really surprising how he does this.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “A gun that you didn't have to reload, but a lot of them were this idea cleanly and safely that it gets off cleanly and safely. The previous attempts at making a revolver would explode in the person's hand, they chew projectiles almost anywhere except straight. It'd go off to the sides behind. So extremely dangerous. So Colts was the first one where, yeah, you could still have misfires, but in large part, it worked as intended. Now let me get back to this part though. To turn his cylinder, Colt used a tiny gear-like disc called a ratchet. Now, where do you get that idea? Colt had spent time on the ship studying the windlass, which employed a ratchet to hoist up the anchor. The ratchet, now this is the most important sentence in this entire section, the ratchet and Colt's gun was minuscule by comparison to a windlass's ratchet, but it worked more or less the same way. So he took the exact same principle, miniaturized it, and applied it to a different domain.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Than to create an instrument that beat death at its own game and could make him rich in the bargain. So this is a little bit about why this innovation came from his work on the ship. And we see this all the time. Great ideas are buried in histories. There's a ton of examples where an idea that's been passed away is picked up several centuries later. Another example of this is where people are working in one domain. They come up with an idea and they apply it to a new domain. That's exactly what happens to Sam and he realizes, hey, the way that this mechanism was working on the ship, I could apply that same mechanism to this idea I have for revolver. So he says where he distinguished himself was in figuring out how to rotate the cylinder, how to turn it from chamber to chamber. How to index a chamber so that it lined up in perfect sync with the barrel in front and the hammer behind, and how to lock the chamber tightly so the shot would get off cleanly and safely. So what they're talking about there is a lot of people had attempted before to make”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “under any authority other than his own. Insofar as he would ever express a dogma, it was the gospel of self determination. It is better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion he would write fourteen years later, continues to expound on his belief in self determination. Its sentiment, meaning self-determination, took deep root in my heart and too has been the mark which has and shall control my destiny.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It's demonstrating his ability to practice self learning. And self-learning was extremely important in the life of Sam Colt because he gets kicked out of school. He has this tendency to blow things up. He actually gets expelled. He's just not a good fit for formal schooling. This is a common theme that we've seen on this podcast, no doubt. So I'm going to fast forward to the point where he's almost an adult. At 17 years old, he has really no options. His family doesn't have a lot of money. He doesn't know what to do with his life. And I'm going to read what he voluntarily does. And the note I ask myself is, what kind of person would do this voluntarily? He was set to embark on a $17,000 voyage across the Atlantic around the Horn of Africa through the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the city of Calcutta. Honeymoon was not quite the word to describe a seventeen thousand mile voyage to Calcutta in eighteen thirty, so he's not doing this for leisure. He's working as a deckhand.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But its products to be improved, manufactured, and sold. Around this time, he's a rather uncontrollable young, he's a teenager at this time, really uncontrollable, really wild and reckless. I mean, he kind of carries those traits his entire life, actually. But he winds up becoming interested in this mill that is by his house. And so he gets a tour from some of the people that work there. And essentially what's happening with this extra I'm about to reach you is he's studying the modern technology of his day. So it says when Colt descended into the mill, he got a free education in the modern technology circa 1830. The most striking fact of the early Industrial Revolution was that it was revolutionary in a literal sense. Everything turned. A young man with a mechanical bent could learn a great deal simply by watching, studying how things connected, how they turned, and how they revolved. Now that part was actually really important because”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Does where you can just fire multiple shots without reloading. So let me jump into Zerlife before I get into his ideas on how he built his business. So there's a financial panic of 1819, and this is a very important part in the life of Sam Colt.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Sam invented a method of blowing up ships in the harbour 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 eighteen fifties that had nearly as much impact on the world as the American political revolution of the seventeen seventies. 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 feather weight. But it did as much, if not more than those to make the world that was coming.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 seventeen he began touring the country as a traveling showman. At eighteen he went up the Mississippi River in a steamboat. At nineteen down the Erie Canal on a canal boat. He was rich by the time he was twenty one, poor at thirty one, then rich again at forty one. 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 post story, though in fact it went the other way. Poe lifted a story from it.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “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 nineteenth century how to make a gun shoot multiple bullets without reloading.”

    2020-10-05 · Founders · #147 Sam Colt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source