In 1834 Levi Lincoln started the Phœnix Iron Works. Under various names (George S. Lincoln & Company, Charles L. Lincoln & Company, The Lincoln Company, The Taylor & Fenn Company) the business has been maintained by his descendants to this day. Levi Lincoln invented a number of machines, among them the first successful hook-and-eye machine for Henry North of New Britain, which became very valuable and helped to lay the foundation of the prosperity of that town. George S. Lincoln & Company built machine tools, architectural iron work and vaults. Their name is permanently associated with the “Lincoln” miller, which was first built in 1855 in their shop for the new Colt Armory, from the design of F. A. Pratt. It was an adaptation and improvement of a Robbins & Lawrence miller which had been brought to Hartford a year or two before. Few machines have changed so little or have been used so widely. It has been said that more than 150,000 of them have been built in this country and abroad. Even in Europe, the type is definitely known by this name. The building of the Colt Armory in 1853 to 1854 marks a definite era in Hartford’s history and the beginning of manufacturing there on a large scale. Samuel Colt had an adventurous life, and died in the midst of his success while less than fifty years old. Born in Hartford in 1814, he had a rather stormy career as a schoolboy and shipped before the mast to Calcutta before he was sixteen. After his return from this voyage, he worked for some months in his father’s dye works at Ware, Mass., where he got a smattering of chemistry. At eighteen he started out again, this time as a lecturer under the name of “Dr. Coult,” giving demonstrations of nitrous-oxide, or laughing gas, which was little known to the public at that time. Dr. Coult’s “lectures” were frankly popular, with a view more to laughter than the imparting of knowledge, but he was clever and a good advertiser. It is said that he gave laughing gas to more men, women and children than any other lecturer since chemistry was first known. For three years he drifted over the country from Quebec to New Orleans, getting into all kinds of experiences, from administering gas for cholera when impressed into service on account of his assumed title, to fleeing the stage from big blacksmiths who took laughing gas too seriously and actively.