Howdy
When Sam Colt was a boy, he used to get into a lot of trouble. His father owned a textile factory in Ware Massachusetts, and young Sam had the run of the place. He loved dabbling with explosives and eventually burned down a building at the boarding school he was attending. So his father arranged for him to learn to be a sailor aboard the brig Corvo on a voyage to Calcutta.
The legend is that observing the action of the ship's wheel inspired him to invent the revolver. What probably happened is that while the Corvo was docked in London he saw one of Collier's flintlock revolvers. Collier patented his revolver in 1818, long before Sam Colt built his first revolver in 1836. Collier's revolver could do almost everything that Colt's revolvers could do. Colt's addition was the pawl which rotated the cylinder when the hammer was cocked. The Collier action was self priming, a compartment released powder into the pan every time the hammer was cocked. Between 1819 and 1824 over 10,000 Collier revolvers were produced, not a bad production run. The only real drawback to the Collier was that flint ignition was relatively unreliable.
Colt returned to the US in 1832. His father financed his early gun designing efforts. Undoubtedly, Colt based part of his Paterson design on the features of the Collier revolver. But the percussion cap made all the difference in reliability. And Colt was at the right place at the right time, when the Industrial Revolution was first gathering steam, allowing him to take advantage of mass production manufacturing methods and techniques that did not exist just ten or twenty years earlier. Although the production line had existed in industry for many years, it was the interchangeable parts made possible by changes in manufacturing technology that allowed Colt to mass produce revolvers.
Colt produced the first practical, mass produced revolver. Collier preceded him by about 20 years in developing a revolver that had a cylinder that would fire each round through a single barrel.
Another thing in Sam Colt's favor was he was a master salesman. He could sell anything. After a while his father refused to finance any more of his manufacturing enterprises. So Sam went on the road more or less as a snake oil salesman to make money. He had learned about Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) from a chemist in his father's factory. Sam made a portable lab and went on tour as the 'Celebrated Dr. Coult of New-York, London and Calcutta'. He would rent a hall, then entice members of the audience to come up and make fools of themselves under the influence of laughing gas, much like a hypnotist. Sam Colt was a master entrepreneur. He was a terrific salesman and could sell anything.
Regarding S&W and their invention of the cartridge revolver: S&W got the idea to build a revolver with bored through cylinders that would fire a cartridge about 1856. When they applied for a patent they found out that a man named Rollin White had beat them to the punch. Rollin White was a previous Colt employee who had dreamed up the idea of a cartridge revolver while still in the employ of Colt. He made up a crude prototype and showed it to Colt. In what was probably the worst business decision of his life, Colt passed on the idea, preferring to produce percussion revolvers. So White patented his idea himself. And in 1856 Smith and Wesson came calling. White refused to sell his patent outright, S&W never owned it. Instead White licensed S&W to produce revolvers with his patent, extracting a royalty of fifty cents for every revolver produced. The White patent did not expire until about 1870. Colt directed his engineers to come up with a legal way to get around the White patent. They never came up with anything really practical, and did not produce their first cartridge revolvers until the White patent expired. Colt could have saved himself a whole lot of aggravation if he had taken Rollin White seriously, and S&W might never have started a revolver company.
