Drop Process of Lead Shot Manufacture
The tower was one of the earliest built to manufacture lead shot using the method pioneered in the 1780s by the Bristol inventor William Watts. Molten lead was poured through a pierced copper plate or sieve at the top of the tower, with the droplets forming perfect spheres by surface tension during the fall; the spherical drops were then cooled in a vat of water at the base. Watts' process was less labour intensive than the earlier method of casting shot in moulds. An early use of the tower was to make lead shot for muskets in the Napoleonic Wars. Although other methods were developed to manufacture shot during the 20th century, the Chester tower was still in use as late as 2001.
Read more about this topic: Chester Shot Tower
Famous quotes containing the words drop, process, lead, shot and/or manufacture:
“But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“Anybody can lead a frivolous life. A frivolous writer, however, must have taste and intelligence.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Too timid to talk back, I shot my adversary.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specialisations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)