The Samuel Clemens Chapter

King Arthur's Court

"The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" was written and published in Hartford, Connecticut, by Mark Twain. The date of publication was July 4,1889. (NOTE: Our Samuel Clemens' Connecticut Yankee was issued July 4, 1989.)

The story revolves around the Connecticut Yankee who, at the time, was employed by Colt Firearms of Hartford, Connecticut. During a fight with a co-worker, he was hit upon the head with a crowbar and wakes up in King Arthur's Camelot. With his knowledge of 19^th century technology, he was able to outwit, out perform, and eventually replacedMerlin the Magician as the chief advisor to King Arthur. Because of the Connecticut Yankee's many feats of "magic," such as conjuring a solar eclipse to save hiw own life, and incorporating a telephone communication system, he became known to all of Camelot as the "BOSS".

Christopher Spencer, a native of Manchester, Connecticut, and a friend of Samuel Clemens, was the role model for THE BOSS. He was a blacksmith, mechanic, inventor, Doctor, and jack-of-all-trades. He was also the inventor of the Spencer Repeating Rifle that helped the North win the Civil War.

The Spencer Repeater was first rejected by the War Department as being too costly for ammunition and uninterested in "crackpot ideas". On August 18, 1863, he met with President Abraham Lincoln and demonstrated the Repeater near where the Washington Monument was later built. With Lincoln's approval of the weapon, which could fire many more rounds per minute than the guns Confederate troops carried, it was assurred that many thousands of Spencer Repeater rifles and carbines (weapons with shorter barrels) would be available for the Union troops as a valuable tool in winning the Civil War. Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman praised it. General George Custer and his troops used the weapon at Gettysburg. A Spencer was even found on Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, when he was cornered and killed.

With the end of the Cicil War, however, the market dried up. In 1868, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company bought out the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company.

In 1862, Spencer was the first person in Connecticut to ever drive a steam-powered automobile in Manchester, CT. He made the boiler tubes out of rejected Spencer rifle barrels. He made over ten steam cars that burned kerosene for deliveries by a New York City dairy.

Shortly after the Civil War, Spencer is credited for having the country's first automobile accident when he sheared the wheel off a milk wagon in Boston.

Spencer secured 42 patents in his lifetime and created labor-saving inventions that streched American industries manpower. In the early 1870's, he developed the drop-forging process and in 1873, he developed his greatest invention - the automatic screw machine, which featured the automatic turret lathe, another invention of his. A single worker could man 10 to 15 machines, instead of one man to each machine.

Spencer even invented household gadgets to help the family cook and toys for to entertain his children, including his 40-foot, steam-propelled yacht, the "Luzette," designed and built by himself, for traveling upon the Connecticut River and the Long Island Sound.

In the 1880's he took up the study of aviation and went on to make about twenty flights during the last two years of his life.

© 2000 The Samuel Clemens Chapter