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4
    Colt himself steadfastly denied that he had been inspired by Collier’s weapons. Indeed (so he claimed), he did not become aware of their existence until years later, during a subsequent voyage to England. His idea, he insisted, was wholly original to himself, an epiphany that came to him on board the
Corvo
, when—so the story goes—he was “watching the action of the ship’s wheel” and suddenly “realized that the same method of locking the wheel in a fixed position could be applied to a revolving firearm.” 5
    This tale became the standard version, the official creation myth recounted throughout the later nineteenth century in books like
Famous Leaders of Industry: The Life Stories of Boys Who Have Succeeded—
inspirational texts intended to teach young men “what an individual can accomplish by ability and indomitable energy and perseverance.” 6
    Did the idea for his revolver really burst upon the mind of sixteen-year-old Sam Colt one day as he watched the first mate at the wheel of the
Corvo
? Perhaps so. Still, the story seems a little too pat, like one of those eureka moments so beloved by the makers of Hollywood biopics. It is undeniably true, however, that at some point during the voyage, Colt used his fifty-cent jackknife and a chunk of scrap wood to whittle a crude model of his invention. It was among his effects when the
Corvo
dropped anchor off Boston on a late spring morning in 1831. 7

12

    C incinnati’s Western Museum was established in 1820 with the high-minded goal of serving as a “citadel of scientific knowledge.” Originally located in the Cincinnati College Building, it began as an assemblage of natural history odds and ends: glass-encased displays of fossils, seashells, stuffed birds and reptiles, geological specimens, Egyptian antiquities, Indian artifacts, and the like. There was also a small library of scientific treatises and a collection of color sketches by the museum’s assistant curator and resident taxidermist, the young artist-naturalist John James Audubon. 1
    Unfortunately, the public seemed less interested in these edifying exhibits than in the novelties offered at a competing establishment, a supposed “fine arts” museum called Letton’s that featured, among other attractions, waxwork effigies of historical figures, a horseshoe reputedly dating back to the sixteenth century, a mummified mermaid, an armless woman, and an “Enormous Elk.” 2 Within two years of its founding, the Western Museum went bankrupt.
    Its fortunes revived when it passed into the hands of an enterprising French émigré named Joseph Dorfeuille. Relocating the museum to a heavily trafficked intersection by the waterfront, he proceeded to transform it from a somber scientific institution into the kind of popular showplace that, as one English commentator observed dryly, defined the notion of museum in nineteenth-century America:
    A “Museum” in the American sense of the word means a place of amusement, wherein there shall be a theatre, somewax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes. In order that there may be some excuse for the use of the word, there is in most instances a collection of stuffed birds, a few preserved animals, and a stock of oddly assorted and very dubitable curiosities; but the mainstay of the “Museum” is the “live art,” that is the theatrical performance, the precocious manikins, or the intellectual dogs and monkeys. 3
    Within months of taking charge, Dorfeuille had reinvigorated business by installing such crowd-pleasing attractions as a seven-legged pig; the absolutely authentic aboriginal war club used to slay Captain Cook; the tattooed head of a New Zealand cannibal; a waxwork tableau depicting the butchering of a wife by her hatchet-wielding husband; and “the head, right hand, and heart of Mathias Hoover, a murderer of local renown,” preserved in alcohol-filled jars. 4
    It was another exhibit, however, that turned