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But Sam Colt’s designs were still immature and the black powder of the day was extremely “dirty,” leaving a great deal of fouling that complicated the functioning of moving parts. For these reasons and because of the lack of government orders, Colt closed the doors of his Paterson enterprise in 1842.

Nevertheless, Colt’s Paterson plant did in fact produce working models of multi-shot handguns, rifles and shotguns. His guns were used in the Seminole War in Florida and, most important, in the fighting to establish the Republic of Texas that would culminate in the Mexican-American War.

The Paterson failure was not the end of Sam Colt, though. Filled with ideas and with insufficient hours in the day to bring them all to life, he experimented with waterproof ammunition, underwater harbor defense systems via coordinated explosive mines and, with Samuel F.B. Morse, the telegraph. In fact, having narrowly averted a war with Louis Philippe’s France in the mid 1830s, the government awarded Colt $50,000 – an immense sum in those days – to further his plans for harbor defense. But hostilities with Mexico, from whom the U.S. demanded a huge chunk of territory, interrupted Colt’s East Coast harbor defense efforts and turned him, once again, into a firearms entrepreneur.