.44 Henry

The .44 Henry is a rimfire cartridge Benjamin Tyler Henry designed alongside the rifle that bears his name while he was foreman at the New Haven Arms Company, patenting both on 16 October 1860. Its significance lies less in its ballistics than in its construction: it was one of the first genuinely reliable self-contained metallic cartridges, at a time when most breechloading rifles still relied on paper or linen cartridges that sealed a breech poorly, or on separate percussion caps in the manner of a muzzleloader. A metallic case that could seal the breech on firing and extract cleanly afterward was the missing piece that made a practical repeating rifle possible, and the Henry rifle built around this cartridge is a direct ancestor of the Winchester line and of lever-action rifles generally.

Its heeled lead bullet was large and slow by the standards of a modern rifle round, giving it a low ballistic coefficient and a pronounced trajectory drop at distance; effective use against a target was generally reckoned in the era at around 100 yards, similar to the practical limits of contemporary muzzleloading infantry rifles in ordinary hands. What set the Henry rifle apart from its muzzleloading and single-shot breechloading contemporaries was not longer range but a sixteen-round magazine, letting it fire far more rounds before a reload was needed than any rifle regularly issued at the time.

The cartridge saw limited but notable use with Union cavalry in the American Civil War, and after the war armed Winchester Model 1866 rifles used by French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and by Ottoman troops in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Civilian demand was strong enough that several revolver makers, including Smith & Wesson and Colt, chambered handguns for the same round so that owners of Henry and Winchester Model 1866 long guns could share ammunition between rifle and sidearm; Colt briefly built its Single Action Army revolver in .44 Henry between 1875 and 1880 for exactly that reason.

No free dimensional or pressure standard exists for a mid-nineteenth-century American commercial cartridge like this one, so every dimension on this page comes from Wikipedia’s own uncited infobox and is recorded as estimated. Its bullet mass is verified against American Rifleman’s own reporting, but no source pairs a published muzzle velocity with a stated test barrel length, so no velocity is recorded here.