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Innovation history

How a technique moved from shop to shop in Hartford

Hartford manufacturers shared techniques across industries, from firearms and sewing machines to bicycles and typewriters. Follow the people, factories and ideas that shaped the city's history of invention.

The onion dome of the Colt armory rising above the Hartford skyline, photographed in black and white from a nearby roof.
The Colt armory dome, still over Coltsville.Jet Lowe, HAER, public domain

  1. 1850s

    Colt Armory

    Made
    Revolvers
    What moved on
    Precision manufacturing technique

    Samuel Colt's armory is the first shop the Smithsonian names when it accounts for how Hartford learned to manufacture with precision. Its onion dome, blue with gold stars and a gold orb, still stands over Coltsville.

    An 1857 engraving of the Colt Armory in Hartford, a long brick factory beside the Connecticut River with its onion dome above the roofline.
    Public domain

  2. 1860s

    Weed Sewing Machine Company

    Made
    Sewing machines
    What moved on
    The same precision methods, on a different product

    Weed built sewing machines in Hartford, and its shop is named alongside the Colt armory as one of the places the city's precision technique was worked out. What had been a way of making firearms turned out to be a way of making anything assembled from many small identical parts.

  3. 1870s

    Pope Manufacturing Company

    Made
    Columbia bicycles
    What moved on
    Metal stamping and electrical resistance welding, added on top

    Albert Pope saw a bicycle at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, bought the American patent rights, and built his first fifty in the empty wings of a Hartford sewing machine plant. His factories borrowed the precision methods already worked out at Colt, at Weed and at the city's machine tool firms, then added their own. By 1895 Columbia bicycles were a national phenomenon and Pope was the largest employer in New England.

    An 1895 lithographed advertisement for Columbia bicycles, made by the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut.
    Boston Public Library, public domain

  4. c.1900

    Pope Manufacturing Company

    Made
    Automobiles
    What moved on
    Bicycle tooling, turned to a heavier machine

    Pope went on to build plants capable of producing more than two thousand automobiles a year, which made him America's leading automaker at the turn of the twentieth century, using tooling and people that had been making bicycles.

  5. 1900s

    Underwood and Royal

    Made
    Typewriters
    What moved on
    Fine assembly at scale, into an office machine

    Underwood and Royal together made Hartford the Typewriter Capital of the World for the first half of the twentieth century. The city that had learned to manufacture with precision now made the office machine of the century.

    Workers on the Underwood typewriter assembly line in 1962, seated in long rows at benches covered with parts.
    Warren K. Leffler, public domain

  6. Today

    The AI Action Lab

    Made
    Your own work
    What moved on
    A method that leaves the room with the person who learned it

    Every time, what carried over was a way of working, and it carried over because the people who had it shared rooms with the people who did not. That is what this floor is for.

Sources for this page

The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center records that Albert Pope's factories borrowed the precision manufacturing techniques already employed in Hartford by the Colt armory, by Weed, and by the city's machine tool firms, and then added their own: metal stamping and electrical resistance welding. Capitol Avenue was one industrial hub producing guns, sewing machines, bicycles and typewriters out of shared technique.