Of Peabodies and Zulus: The British Martini Henry Rifle
One of the most iconic rifles of the late 19th century was the Martini-Henry. While it didn’tave
anything to do with the drink, this very British design (with American undertones) was revolutionary for its time and is still an affordable collectable today.
To understand where the Martini rifle started at, one needs to look at the 1862-era rolling block rifle of Henry O. Peabody from Boston, Massachusetts. Good old Henry O tried to get his rifle worked out for ready sales to the Union Army in the Civil War but just missed out. He did
however sell about 15,000 of his Peabody rifles, nice single shot breech-loaders with a lever
action that loaded and extracted the cartridge, to Switzerland. It was in Switzerland that Friedrich von Martini took the basic design, added a toggle moved by the rifle’s striker, added it to the barrel designed by Scotch gunsmith Alexander Henry, and produced the Martini-Henry rifle in 1871.
The rifle was simple and easy to operate. Instead of muzzleloading rifles that took even a skilled soldier 15 seconds and a half dozen movements to load, all one had to do with the Martini was drop the lever by the trigger which opened the breech, slide a one-piece brass cased cartridge into it, and close the lever before pulling the trigger to fire. This meant that the average rifleman could fire amazing 12-rounds per minute, which for 1871 was the equivalent of a machinegun today. Since the 485-grain .577/450 caliber Boxer-Henry brass cartridges replaced paper cased loads, the shots were more consistent and accurate with effective hits on man-sized targets out to 400-yards expected. Volley sights, raised like a ladder with the intention of producing plunging fire at great distances to ‘keep the enemies head down’ allowed rainbow trajectory rounds to be fired as far as 1900-yards distant.
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