Colt Methods

To the field of musket-making, Sam Colt brought novel engineering and quick, and large, profits.
Collectors have lately been surprised that the Colt Special Model rifle musket resembles the British Enfield. Harking back to the ill-fated Robbins & Lawrence project on Enfields for the British Government, they seek to explain this resemblance by suggesting that Colt used spare parts which he could buy cheaply from the junk dealers. They also suggest that Lamson, Goodnow & Yale, successors to Robbins & Lawrence, and Amoskeag, who worked in the same technical “atmosphere” as the famed and defunct Windsor makers, could somehow use the R & L Enfield tools in the production of the Special Model which they undertook. All this is unreasonable to the reasonably informed mechanical person.

Tools of Robbins & Lawrence, made for the 1853 Interchangeable Enfield, will produce only components of the Ml853 Interchangeable Enfield, and no other. They would not produce an arm similar, but different. No, the differences in spite of the similarity prove the Colt Special Model as made by Colt, and by the more northern contractors, were produced on new tools made from new drawings of a new arm. But, why was it so close to the Enfield? The answer, we feel sure, lay in what today is known as cost-accounting or analysis.
In those days it was roughly known as figuring your profits. Too easily a competent gunsmith but incompetent accountant could figure his profits wrong and manufacture himself right into the poor house. Colt had done it a little differently. For in his vaults, at the time his country needed his technical skills, there reposed a complete set of drawings of the Interchangeable Enfield, and all the costing of each and every part. This is known to have been the case because Colt in 1854, testifying before the Parliamentary Investigating Committee which was studying the Gun Trade in England, made a boast. It was not an idle nor a little boast; it undercut the Government price on muskets by an astonishing degree. In a formal letter to the British Board of Ordnance sometime before March, 1854, Colt wrote indicating his estimate of what the Enfield rifle could be made for, not, as he stated, with a view to obtaining a contract, but with a view to giving comparative values between properly capitalized manufacturers, and the then current system of hand fabrication.

“So confident am I that this system of manufacturing firearms is correct,” he wrote, “and the only one by which arms can be made the one like the other, with economy, that I am free to say, what I have before verbally stated, that with one hundred thousand pounds expended in machinery, tools and etc., one million of rifled muskets can be produced at an expense of thirty shillings each. . . . (but) if you desire me to do so, at the prices above named, thirty shillings; and I would endeavor to do all the work in this country unless I should be interrupted by combinations of operatives claiming from me more than the present price of manual labor.”

Colt did not make his offer to entice the British Government into giving him a contract; but if they should call his bluff, he was ready and willing to do the job at the price quoted, labor remaining the same. This means beyond question that he had broken his costs down into such definite terms as machine time to make a part of specific form and, in 1861, if he could persuade the United States to accept a part of specific form, that is, Enfield form, in a “new pattern musket,” he would have a great jump over his competition in estimating his own costs. A thirty shilling musket ($7.50 equivalent) might be worth as much as $10 or $12 with the smaller quantities, higher proportional capitalization, and higher cost of labor, in the United States. But if he could adopt a pattern that would use certain hard-to-make Enfield parts, that he could obtain at low prices from specialists in the English gun trade, he would be still ahead of the pack on profits. Comparisons between an Enfield, the Springfield 1855, modified 1861, and the Colt Special Musket reveals some of the profit making similarities, and some of the engineering improvements.