Martini–Henry

The Martini–Henry replaced the Snider–Enfield, itself a muzzle-loader hastily converted to fire a metallic cartridge, with a rifle designed from the outset as a breechloader. Its falling-block action combined Henry O. Peabody’s dropping breech block, reworked by the Swiss engineer Friedrich von Martini into a hammerless design cocked by the underlever itself, with polygonal rifling by the Scottish gunmaker Alexander Henry. Pulling the underlever down and forward tips the block clear of the chamber for loading and draws the striker spring back in the same motion; there is no separate hammer to cock and no magazine to load: one round at a time, by hand.

It entered British service in 1871 and stayed there, in one mark or another, for 47 years, fighting through the colonial campaigns of the late Victorian empire, including Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War. Early production used a rolled brass-foil cartridge case that expanded under firing pressure until it stuck or tore in the chamber, jamming the action; the fix, a stronger drawn-brass case paired with a longer loading lever for more forceful extraction, arrived on the Mk IV. Ottoman forces used near-identical rifles built under contract by the Providence Tool Company in Rhode Island, and Romania bought a further batch from Steyr in Austria-Hungary, production the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, already at capacity rearming British troops, could not itself supply. The design was eventually superseded by the bolt-action, magazine-fed Lee–Metford, and converted survivors chambered for smaller-bore cartridges were reissued under other names, among them the Martini–Enfield and Martini–Metford, rather than as the Martini–Henry itself.

The same falling-block action, retooled by W. W. Greener decades later for a proprietary shotshell that no other gun could chamber, became the Greener Prison Shotgun issued to colonial prison and police services; the change of cartridge family and role makes it a separate design built on the same mechanism rather than a configuration of this one.

This entry has no verified weight, overall length, barrel length, sight range or production total: the cited Wikipedia infobox carries all of them with no inline citation of its own, so they are recorded here as estimated rather than verified. No free primary source (a period ordnance manual or a museum collection record) was found online to upgrade them.