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And we continue with our American stories.

Walter Hunt is known as the Yankee mechanical genius. His hundreds of inventions

include a saw, a steamer, inkstands, a nail-making machine, a rifle, a revolver, bullets, bicycles,

a shirt collar, a boot heel, and a ceiling-walking circus device. Hunt's most successful invention

was designed in just three hours to settle

a $15 debt to one of the many draftsmen he tasked with drawing up his patents. Here is our frequent

contributor, Ashley Lubinsky, with the story. She's the co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of

Arms, the former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and's the co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, the former curator in charge

of the Cody Firearms Museum, and is the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of

Law's Firearms Research Center. Here's Ashley. It never ceases to amaze me how often

prolific inventors are left on the cutting room floor of

history. And there's another part of that too, which is you see in the 19th century a lot of

inventors who dabble in multiple different kind of industries. And you see both of these things

happening with one inventor in the 1840s.

And so he's the inventor of the safety pin and a successful lock stitch sewing machine.

But he was also behind some of the most important developments in modern firearms technology.

Walter Hunt was born in upstate New York in 1796.

And by his 21st birthday, he actually earned advanced degrees in masonry and quickly kind of moved on to a career of inventing. And this man kind of invented a little bit of everything.

His initial inventions surrounded improvements in milling machinery, but he quickly turned to the eclectic

for the rest of his career. The first major, major thing that he's known for was his invention

of a bell that was affixed to a carriage. So in response to a carriage accident, that actually the carriage ran over a child,

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