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AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

WORKAHOLICS

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Most writers begin to spin the Colt narrative at a point where the young Sam, who is perhaps 14 years old, is sitting under a tree. There, he begins to dismantle, and then to reconstruct, an Andy Jackson-era handgun. Perhaps the story is true. It sounds a little too similar to the myth of Isaac Newton’s inspiration about the theory of gravity – he is sitting in a garden and a falling apple hits him on the head – for my taste.

In both cases, the problem with these myths is that genius is evident long before the age of 17, before Samuel Colt spent a year at sea and conceptualized, in the whirling ship’s capstan, an application to a repeating firearm. And it is not “simple” genius – if something so mysterious and complex could be considered simple – that changes the world. It is genius with some other element: curiosity or opportunity, for instance. It is genius with application that changes the world.

In the case of Colt and Newton – and John Browning, another famous name inextricably linked to the Colt enterprise – that additional element was some inner drive that we have of late labeled “workaholic,” as if to be consumed with one’s life work or hobby or obsession was a bad thing!