He made the first crude model of his revolver on his voyage to Calcutta and used the means derived from his “lectures” for developing the invention. In 1835 he went to England and took out his first patent there and on his return in 1836 he took out his first American patent. These covered a firearm with a rotating cylinder containing several chambers, to be discharged through a single barrel. The same year, 1836, he organized the Patent Fire Arms Company at Paterson, N. J., and tried to get the revolver adopted by the United States Government. In 1837 an army board reported “that from its complicated character, its liability to accident, and other reasons, this arm was entirely unsuited to the general purposes of the service.” Colt’s first market was secured on the Texas frontier. His earliest revolvers are known as the Walker and Texas models, and the hold which he acquired with frontiersmen at that time has never been lost. The Seminole War in Florida gave Colt an opportunity to demonstrate the value of the revolver. In 1840 two government boards gave it a qualified approbation and two small orders followed, one for one hundred and the other for sixty weapons. The pistols, however, were expensive, the sales small, and in 1842 the Paterson company failed and ceased business. In the next few years the tide turned. The superiority of the revolvers outstanding was creating a great demand. With the breaking out of the Mexican War in 1846 came two orders for 1000 pistols each, and from that time onward Colt’s career was one of rapid and brilliant success. As his Paterson plant had closed, Colt had the first of the large government orders made at the Whitney Armory in New Haven, where he followed minutely every detail of their manufacture. The following year, 1848, Colt moved to Hartford and for a few years rented a small building near the center of the city. With rapidly increasing business, larger quarters soon became necessary. In 1853 he began his new armory, shown in Fig. 32. South of the city on the river front, lay an extensive flat, overflowed at high water and consequently nearly valueless. He purchased a large tract of this, built a protective dike 30 feet high and 1³⁄₄ miles long, and drained it. His armory built on this site marks an epoch not only in the history of Hartford, but in American manufacturing. After the failure of his first venture at Paterson, Colt had seen the advantage of interchangeable manufacture at the Whitney shop, and determined to carry it even further in his new plant. So thoroughly was this done that the methods crystallized there, and many of the tools installed have undergone little change to this day. Machine work almost wholly superseded hand work. Modern machines were developed, and interchangeability and standards of accuracy given an entirely new meaning.