Martini-Henry Rifle

The Martini-Henry is a breech-loading, single-shot service rifle that combined a falling-block action designed by Friedrich von Martini with polygonal rifling by the Scottish gunmaker Alexander Henry. Adopted by the British Army in 1871, it fired the .577/450 Martini-Henry cartridge, could manage around twelve rounds a minute in trained hands, and remained standard issue through the end of the First World War in 1918. It saw extensive service across British colonial campaigns, most famously the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the defense of Rorke's Drift, and armies including the Ottoman Empire, Romania, Egypt, and the Boer republics also carried it into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.