ble invention, a machine to bend ship's timbers without
splintering them. The later years of his life were spent in Boston,
and he often served as a patent expert in the courts, where his wide
knowledge, hard common sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a
welcome witness.

We now glance at another New England inventor, Samuel Colt, the man who
carried Whitney's conceptions to transcendent heights, the most dashing
and adventurous of all the pioneers of the machine shop in America. If
"the American frontier was Elizabethan in quality," there was surely a
touch of the Elizabethan spirit on the man whose invention so greatly
affected the character of that frontier. Samuel Colt was born at
Hartford in 1814 and died there in 1862 at the age of forty-eight,
leaving behind him a famous name and a colossal industry of his own
creation. His father was a small manufacturer of silk and woolens at
Hartford, and the boy entered the factory at a very early age. At
school in Amherst a little later, he fell under the displeasure of his
teachers. At thirteen he took to sea, as a boy before the mast, on the
East India voyage to Calcutta. It was on this voyage that he conceived
the idea of the revolver and whittled out a wooden model. On his return
he went into his father's works and gained a superficial knowledge of
chemistry from the manager of the bleaching and dyeing department. Then
he took to the road for three years and traveled from Quebec to New
Orleans lecturing on chemistry under the name of "Dr. Coult." The main
feature of his lecture was the administration of nitrous oxide gas to
volunteers from the audience, whose antics and the amusing showman's
patter made the entertainment very popular.

Colt's ambition, however, soared beyond the occupation of itinerant
showman, and he never forgot his revolver. As soon as he had money
enough, he made models of the new arm and took out his patents; and,
having enlisted the interest of capital, he set up the Patent Arms
Company at Paterson, New Jersey, to manufacture the revolver. He did not
succeed in having the revolver adopted by the Government, for the army
officers for a long time objected to the percussion cap (an invention,
by the way, then some twenty years old, which was just coming into use
and without which Colt's revolver would not have been practicable) and
thought that the new weapon might fail in an emergency. Colt found
a market in Texas and among the frontiersm