Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse
German inventor
Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse (20 November 1787 – 9 December 1867) was a German firearms inventor and manufacturer. He is most famous for submitting the Dreyse needle gun in 1836 to the Prussian army, which was adopted for service in December 1840 as the Leichte Perkussions-Gewehr M 1841 – a name deliberately chosen to mislead about the rifle's mechanism – later renamed Zündnadelgewehr M 1841 in 1855.
Biography
Dreyse was born in Sömmerda (then ruled by the Archbishopric of Mainz), the son of a locksmith. Dreyse worked from 1809 to 1814 in the Parisian gun factory of Jean-Samuel Pauly, a Swiss who designed several experimental breech-loading military rifles. After returning to Sömmerda in 1814, he founded a company to manufacture percussion caps. It was there that he designed the needle rifle.
While the gun is thought of by some to be the first bolt-action rifle, in reality it bears little resemblance to modern bolt-action rifles, except for the bolt principle itself which was applied to close the breech. Ammunition for the Dreyse rifle was made up of paper cartridges holding the bullet into a sabot. The gun's needle penetrated the paper cartridge before igniting the black powder charge. The Dreyse's simple construction made it relatively easy to keep clean and in operation.
“Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse” enters the record as german inventor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Johann, Nicolaus and Dreyse can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q71006. VIAF identifies the subject as 64396926. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1787, 1867, 1836 and 1840.
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This entry incorporates text from “Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.