.577 Snider

The .577 Snider is a British black-powder centrefire cartridge, designed in 1866 by Colonel Edward Boxer, Superintendent of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, specifically for the Snider–Enfield rifle, itself a conversion of the earlier Pattern 1853 Enfield muzzleloader to breech-loading. Boxer built his cartridge on a construction London gunmaker George H. Daw had developed shortly before for a centrefire shotgun round: a metal cup holding the primer, pressed into the base of a case body, with a perforated papier-mâché wad around the primer pocket to let the priming flame reach the powder charge. Boxer combined that cup with a paper-covered brass foil case and patented the result in June 1866, a year ahead of Daw’s own patent on the underlying idea.

Early Snider cartridges proved fragile: the case tended to split at the metal cup or at the join between cup and case body when fired, causing misfires and jammed extraction. Boxer revised the design through Mark II and Mark III versions, and it was this later, sturdier construction that became the pattern for British military-issue Snider ammunition. The type served as Britain’s standard rifle cartridge only briefly, from 1866 to 1871, before the Martini–Henry and its .577/450 cartridge replaced it.

No free dimensional standard exists for a mid-Victorian black-powder military cartridge like this one, so every dimension on this page comes from Wikipedia’s own uncited infobox and is recorded as estimated. Two different bullet weights are given in different parts of the same Wikipedia article (480 grains in the lead and 450 grains in the infobox), and neither is paired with a stated test barrel length, so this page records only a bullet mass and no velocity.