Having seen such a tower, I would never have guessed what it was for. Some kind of pipe! Gamblers will probably immediately suggest such an option that arrows were sitting in these towers and firing at the enemy.
Was it really so? Let's find out …
The Shot Tower, Bristol, England.
Shot making in the 18th century was a chore. First you need to melt a piece of lead, pour it into a mold, let it cool, remove it, wash it … and so on - thousands of times, depending on the size of your army.
But industrialist William Watts turned shot making into a simple and outrageously efficient procedure. One day, he watched the rain and noticed that the water droplets flying in the air had a perfect round shape. If this happens to water, why doesn't it happen to molten lead, William wondered.
The Dubuque, Iowa shot tower.
For this he built a special tower, from the top floor of which molten lead was poured down. Liquid lead disintegrated into spherical droplets and froze even in flight. To prevent the falling shot from deforming and finally cooling down, a pool of water was arranged at the foot of the tower. All William had to do was get out a shot and sort it by size.
This is how the history of shooting towers began. Medieval towers for casting shot have survived in many countries of the world - Bristol (Great Britain), Daugavpils (Latvia), Tampere (Finland), Melbourne (Australia), Montreal (Canada), Brussels (Belgium), etc.
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But casting shot at home without towers:-)
The fraction was cast from pure lead or with a small admixture of other substances, for example, arsenic sulphide, tin, antimony.
The alloy for English shot consists of lead containing about 0.2% arsenic, which converts more easily into spherical droplets and is somewhat harder than pure lead. To prepare such an alloy, metallic arsenic or its sulfur compounds are added to lead: realgar or orpiment.
The molten metal is poured into a copper "colander" with holes from 0.07 to 0.5 mm in diameter, the bottom of which is covered with a layer of porous cinders that collect on the surface of the molten lead. Lead droplets are much larger than holes, and of different sizes; however, the largest fraction numbers have to be cast in iron molds. Shot casting is carried out from a height of 30-45 m to cool lead drops in the air through iron sieves into tanks filled with water. The height of the drop of lead drops can be reduced if an artificial current of cold air is blown from below.
Sorting From the water, the shot goes to the drying table, and then to the rotating drum, where it is poured for a long time so that small irregularities on the surface of the grains are wiped off. Smoothed grains spill out onto the upper edge of the system of weakly inclined planes: regular spherical pellets roll to the bottom, and wrong ones sooner or later roll to the side and go to the overflow. Selected shot is sorted through screens and then finally polished by rotation in drums with added graphite.