Invention Of The Shot Tower

"Before Watts had his dream," sa3-s The Mechanical World, "the making of shot was a slow, laborious and consequently costly process. Watts had to take great bars of lead and pound them out into sheets of a thickness nearly equal to the diameter of the shot he desired to make. He then had to ent these sheets into little cubes, place the cubes in a revolving barrel and roll the barrel around until by the constant f riction the edge wore off from the little cubes and they became spheroids. "Watts had of ten racked his brain trying to discover some better and less costly scheme, but in va;n. Finally, after spending an evening with some boon companions at the alehouse, he went home and went to bed. He soon feil into a profound slumber, bat the stimulants he had imbibed apparently disagreed with him, for his sleep was disturbed by unwelcome dreams. He imagined he was out again with tho 'boys,' and that as they were stumbling hoineward inhe dark it began to ra;u shot. Beautiful globules of lead, polished and shining, feil in a torrent, and compelled him and his bibulous companions to drag their heavy limbs to a place of shelter. "In the morning when Watts arose he remembered his dream. He turned it over in his mind all day and wondered what shape molten lead would assume in falling through the air. These thoughts tormented him so persistently that at last, to set his mind at rest, he carried a ladleful of molten lead to the top of the steeple of the Church of St. Mary, of Redcliff, and dropped it into a moat below. Descending, he took from the bottom of the shallow pool several handfuls of the xaost perfect shot he had ever seen. Watts' fortune was made, for he had conceived the idea of the shot tower, which ever since has been the enly means employed in the manufacture f the little missiles so important in war and sport." Melted lead ought to be able to drop from the top of a tower in the Unit6d States as cheaply as elsewhere, but here we put a duty of two and one-half cents a pound on shot to protect our shot towers. For some yeaxs the duty it s been practitally prohibitory, the figures at hand showing imports of less than a htmdred dollars' worth per year. It is nnderstood that the shot product of this country is uontroUed by a trust. A muskrat carne near drowning a horse in Grass Lake recently. The way the muskrat did it was by burrowing a hole under the road which runs by the lake. When the horse stepped over the hole, the road gave way and the horsï was thrown over into the lake.