Colt's Manufacturing Company

Samuel Colt’s Hartford armoury was incorporated in 1855 and has traded under variations of the same name ever since, through bankruptcy in 1992, reorganisation two years later and acquisition by the Czech CZG group in 2021. Its nineteenth-century revolvers and its twentieth-century military contracts are almost two separate businesses sharing one rampant-colt trademark. For a reference site the second weighs heavier: the company held Eugene Stoner’s patents from 1959 and was for two decades the sole source of the M16 to the United States armed forces.