Aye, and the ‘hammers’ are cocking levers, so it really is a ‘hammerless’ centre-fire.
What followed next is interesting to me. Pauly left for London after the fall of Paris to the Allies in 1814, to pursue his interests in building an airship. He teamed up with with the London gunmaker Durs Egg (a fellow Swiss countryman), but their fish-shaped hydrogen-filled airship never flew. The gunmaker Henri Roux took over Pauly’s Paris business and built Pauly-type lifting-breech guns. Roux’s successor, Eugene Pichereau, took the backwards step of adapting the Pauly-Roux gun to use an external nipple and cap. In 1827 Casimir Lefaucheux took over from Pichereau, and patented improvements to the gun in 1828. Around this time Lefaucheux made the logical deduction that eliminating the distance between the fulminate and the main charge (by placing it inside the cartridge) would make for surer ignition, and he designed the pinfire cartridge to do so. In 1833 Lefaucheux patented the hinge-action breech-loading gun, and in 1836 he patented his pinfire cartridge. It would take Benjamin Houllier’s addition in 1846 of a base wad to make the pinfire cartridge gas-tight, but none of this would have happened without Pauly’s revolutionary design.
I was able to examine a Pauly gun up close, it was remarkably clever!
