Steve, You are right about Needham:
https://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=319028"On 2 October 1852 Joseph Needham of Ashtead Row, Birmingham registered patent No. 184 for a gun lock and the first successful hammerless needle-fire gun. He is known to have made needle-fire guns on the Rissack design. In 1850 Jean Jacques Rissack of Liege, Belgium patented a needle-fire gun in which the primer was in the base behind the powder as opposed to backing onto the over-powder wad, and the pin was either in the breech plug or on the hammer. Rissack's pistols and gallery rifles were very popular, the cartridges were made by Eley."
Prussia actually adopted the Dreyse Needle Gun in 1848. This fact was raised regularly in "The Field" and in Parliament, especially by proponents of the Prince Patent (1855) to try to get Arsenal to get their heads out of the Enfield sand.
That's the problem with trying to interpret advertisements for center break guns from this period. There was a lot of different breech-loading rifles coming out in the 1850's. So unless an advertisement actually refers to "Lefaucheaux" or "Fusils a Bascule" or "break-action" or some such, it's very difficult to know whether the ad is actually talking about center-break pin-fires.
For instance the Fall 1856 H.Holland ad for breech-loader shotguns...."perfect for Battue Shooting" - was this a center break gun or a version of the needle fire breech loader rifle he advertised just below it?
Battue Shooting (Battue is beaten in French...driven, beaten game)
So far it looks like Reilly is the very earliest to specifically be advertising center-break breech-loading guns in the UK Press.
