Friends who know me well know that in the 19th century, I wrote more about German and French weapons, after all, from the time of Napoleon to the end of the 19th century, europe was the most important of these two countries in playing light weapons. On the other hand, the British dark minions next door played the continental balance of power, but did not intervene too much in continental affairs, so they lagged behind the German and French in infantry weapons. This article tells you about the first full-loaded rifle in Britain in the 1870s, the favorite of a scout in the field - Martini Henry.
The mid-19th century was the era of the massive conversion of rifles from smoothbore to rifled, thanks to the Invention of the Minignes cartridge by the French. Bullets with slightly smaller rifled bullets can be easily loaded from the bore, and the hollow tail of the bullet is propped open by gunpowder gas when fired, so that the edge of the warhead can rotate close to the rifling.
The British also introduced the Enfield P53 rifle in 1853, which was very uncreatively fired using the then common external fire cap firing, using Minnes bullets, breech loading. At this time, Prussia was already equipped with a Dreiser needle gun with a breech bolt closure.
By the 1860s, Prussia had won the Putin and Austro-Prussian wars with Dreiser all the way, forcing the French to develop the same breech-loading Schasebo in 1866. Britain, as a European churning stick, naturally did not pull down as an observer, and it turned out that both the German Dreiser and the French Shassepo were all breech rifles, and the rate of fire was far greater than the Enfield fire sticks in their hands. The British could not sit still, but it would take time to build a new gun, war was not waiting for anyone, and the expedient was to change the Enfield P53 rifles to breech loading, which was called the Enfield Schneider rifle.
Of course, the expediency is temporary. When the British changed Enfield Schneider, they naturally also had to develop a well-loaded needle-haired central fire rifle. This is Martini Henry.
To explain this awkward gun name first, Martini refers to the Swiss designer Friedrich Martini's improved built-in hammer, landing locking bolt (the take-off and landing locking was first created by the American Pibot during the American Civil War, but disappeared with the end of the Civil War);
Henry, on the other hand, refers to the prismatic rifling modified by the Scotsman Alexander Henry, which has a very good airtight effect.
Therefore, martini Henry co-authored is the use of martini-style landing locking bolt and Henry polygon rifle, but also the first specially designed breech rifle in the British Zheng'er Bajing. His take-off and landing lock is driven by a lever, somewhat similar to the operation of a lever rifle. But the latching method is different, and Martini Henry is a single, so there is no lever rifle's magazine and lever-moving support plate, but he has a figure-7 ejector that can eject empty shells in the chamber when the bolt sinks to the bottom.
It fires .577/450 black powder metal fixed-loaded ammunition, look at this number is very blindfolded is not it? The ghost knows what the British brain thinks, and its actual caliber is .450 inchesmm, which is 11.43mm. The front of the .577 inches converted into metric units is 14.7mm, which is the bullet caliber of the previous Enfield Schneider rifle, because the .577/450 bullet is based on the .577 Schneider metal fixed-loading bullet, so it gave him such a ghost animal name. The Martini muzzle has an initial velocity of 410 m/s, a warhead weight of 31 grams, and a kinetic energy of 2630 joules, which belongs to the medium and upper level of kinetic energy in the rifle at that time.
↑From left to right, they are .577 Schneider, .577/450 (projectile body rolled in copper foil), .577/450 (projectile body drawn from copper bowl), .303british.
Martini Henry's most famous appearance was the Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British repelled an attack of 3-4,000 Zulu warriors with 150 men. Its main credit is the Martini Henry rifle, which would be unimaginable if it were replaced by the previous breech rifle.
However, during the Zulu War, the British also found that the shells rolled in copper foil were very thin, overexpanded when fired, and the sticky chamber problem was very serious, often resulting in the inability to open the chamber or even pull the shell. So in the 1880s they replaced copper foil cases with copper-plated cases. At the same time, the British also felt that the .450 caliber warhead was too heavy and the ballistic drop was very strong, so they began to try to replace the .577/450 with a smaller caliber bullet, first with the .402 caliber, and began to replace it gradually.
But at this time, there were already many magazine-loaded rifles in the world, and the single-shot Martini was already slightly behind. And although smokeless gunpowder has not yet arrived, the trend of shrinking rifle caliber has swept across Europe. In 1888, the British introduced the .303 rifle cartridge (7.7mm) and the corresponding Lee Metford rifle instead of Martini Henry. But in the same way, britain, as a sea power country, is a slow process to change the equipment of the army. For cost reasons, they replaced Martini Henry with a Matford barrel adapted to the .303 cartridge, also known as Martini Metford
But like Lee Metford, it wasn't a few years before Britain should have used a smokeless gunpowder .303 rifle cartridge. Because the Metford rifling was easily worn under the high temperature pressure of smokeless gunpowder, the rifling designed by the Enfield Arsenal was switched to. And a martini due to the strength of the take-off and landing lock is enough, so it also changed, this batch is called martini Enfield, during the First World War, the British army also had many troops equipped with this ticket gun.