Paul Revere is a hero because he risked his life for the colonists. He was a messenger transporting information between the colonies of Lexington and Concord. The members of these colonies were fighting against “Taxation Without Representation." Paul Revere made the famous Midnight Ride from Boston to Concord. He warned the colonists, “The British are coming.” Paul Revere was one of the few living witnesses to hear the first shots of the American Revolutionary War.

though most familiar as the hard-riding hero of Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s claims to historical significance rest even more on his talent as a craftsman and on his industrial perspicacity. The son of a Huguenot silversmith, Apollos Rivoire, and Deborah Hitchbourn, Revere received a rudimentary “writing-school” education before turning to his father’s trade. Upon the latter’s death, Paul at nineteen assumed artistic responsibility for the family’s shop. Over the next twenty years, he became one of the preeminent American goldsmiths–a term that encompassed every phase of the eighteenth-century precious-metals craftsman’s art. Besides silver bowls, utensils, pots, and flatware (many of which are museum pieces today), Revere and his apprentices and journeymen turned out a variety of engravings: pictures, cartoons, calling cards, bookplates, tradesmen’s bills, and even music. As a sideline, he practiced what passed for dentistry in his day, developing as well a rudimentary form of orthodontia.