LAROCCA: The Colt revolver is what people think of as sort of the gun that won the West.

NARRATOR: Donald LaRocca.

LAROCCA: And Samuel Colt certainly was very famous for his inventions, and he’s the first one to really patent a functional type of revolver that could be mass-produced. We take for granted the fact that things that we have machines and so on all have interchangeable parts, but that was a radical notion in the early nineteenth century. Colt revolvers were really the first weapons to have fully interchangeable parts. So, Colt was a real pioneer in that sense.

He was also a great showman and a great businessman, and one of the things he did to drum up business was to have these very elaborate, very beautifully decorated pistols made by a specialized group of craftsmen in his factory in Hartford Connecticut, and then present them to various heads of state or to other important people, politicians, and so on. This particular pistol is one of a set that Colt had made during the Crimean war. And as a good businessman he tried to drum up business from both sides in that conflict, so he presented pistols to the King of England, he presented pistols to the Czar of Russia, and pieces to the Sultan of Turkey—all the major powers that were involved in that particular conflict.

This particular gun was the one that was presented to the Sultan of Turkey, and it’s very patriotic, very American decoration on it of a bust of George Washington, the American flag, the American eagle—all beautifully inlaid in gold on a blued background. The decorator was Gustav Young who was a German craftsman who, at that period, was responsible for the most elaborate guns coming out of the Colt factory. Colt would show off not only the beauty of the mechanism and the way the gun functioned, but by making them very attractive to the eye, he then hoped to get commissions from the various heads of state that he gave them to, and it frequently worked.