Up a Shot Tower.
HE writer of this paper, in the pursuit of his profession, has probably sunk lower and attained to greater heights than the majority of his confrères. Some months ago he required material for an article on antimony, a metal used for the hardening of shot and shell. He went to Cornwall, where an antimony mine exists, and plunged seventy or eighty feet into the bowels of the earth. It was a unique experience, and ten minutes in that dark, wet hole, in which the miners were busy, gave one a very vivid and lasting idea of the lives of the men who secure for us the treasures of Nature. In a general way the conditions of shot manufacture are precisely opposite to those of mining. Instead of descending a ladder with an agility calculated to turn a monkey green with envy, one has to ascend a tower by means of steps which even a hardened tread-millite might conceivably agree would constitute a fair "turn." Shot—small shot that is, not bullets, the latter being made in moulds—is manufactured at the top of a tower, or in some place where a considerable space exists beneath. A disused mine shaft is just as good as a tower, the indispensable condition being a couple of hundred feet of air through which the shot may fall.
The shot tower.
Before we describe the manufacture of shot it will be interesting to examine a 28 lb. bag, such as the majority of our readers have probably seen at some time or other. The bag laid flat is roughly the size of this page; and 28 lbs. far from fill it. If you take the trouble to count the shot, or get at an estimate of the number the bag contains, you will find that there are from 50,000 to 70,000, the number depending upon the size of the shot. Assuming one knows nothing about the matter, it would naturally seem that the manufacture of so many separate little balls must occupy a terrible time. To mould them would be an interminable process. As a matter of fact shot is produced at a rate varying from, say, 24 millions to 30 millions an hour—from 400,000 to 500,000 a minute. These figures sound incredible, and we should certainly doubt them if we had not made the calculation ourselves.
Near the south end of Waterloo Bridge, and within a few yards of the Thames, stands a monster structure known as the Shot Tower. It is a familiar sight, but not even your London cabby, in nine cases out of ten, knows that it is a shot tower. With the permission of the proprietors we will pay it a visit, and see how the shot is produced. Arrived at the base, the first thing we notice is a sharp, incessant shower of silvery rain falling into a huge tub of water. It makes a noise very like that of an overflowing waste-pipe high up in one's wall. Its source we cannot quite see. A hundred feet above us is a floor or first stage, through an opening in which the shower is passing. Evidently it begins from a much greater height than this even.
The prospect of the climb is not particularly enticing. There are 327 steps, it is a hot day, and the place is necessarily not scrupulously clean. However, duty calls, and provided with a canvas bag to save one's hand and cuff in clutching at the railing or iron banister, we make a
