Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1875 — How Shot Are Made. [ARTICLE]

How Shot Are Made.

y _ , M ... ... You have all seen shot, and if you are a boy you have probably used it a good many times, to the terror of mother and sisters and the imminent risk of your

own lives or somebody else’s, but bow many of you can tell how they are made? To look at them one would not imagine they had to go through such a long and intricate process to make them the smooth, round, innocent-looking, but death-dealing, things that they are. If you ever come to Chicago one of the first things that will be apt to strike yeur eye is a high, round tower, rising up seventeen stories and almost as high as the highest church steeples, and here is where the shot are made!

The melted lead is taken to the top of this high tower and poured through a colander or sieve, the drops falling down in real leaden rain, nearly 200 feet, cooling as they go, just as drops of rain harden into hailstones, and falling into a tank of water below. Now this might seem a simple and easy thing to do, and so it would be if that were all there was to it. But it is not. The drops of melted lead in falling have a tendency to eool at the bottom first, and so instead of hardening into a round ball the upper part would stretch out like the tail of a comet. Then, again, Imuid metals crystallize in hardening, eac|i particular metal having its own form, ahd it happens that lead crystallizes into cubes instead of globes, so that unless the drops can be made to form into spheres as soon as they leave the colander they will harden into cubes and comets and all sorts of things before they reach the bottom; so it was necessary to search around and find something else which crystallized in a different form in order to counteract this tendency. It was found that arsenic was the very thing. So now a small quantity of arsenic is mixed with all the lead and the little drops form into globes as soon as they leave the colander and most of them harden in that shape. Some are imperfect, however. They are lifted from the water in little cups fastened to a revolving shaft, which also empties them upon metal plates, where they are dried by steam, and then the good and the bad are sepa-. rated from each other. In order to do this a polished iron plate is tilted at a certain angle, and the little balls are made to roll down it. The perfect ones roll so fast and so easily, and get such a momentum, that when they come to the umping-off place they make a bound and go clear over into a bin fixed for them about a foot away. The imperfect ones, the comets and such like, find their tails in the way, and go so much slower that when they come to the end they have only just force enough to drop down into a receptacle at the bottom, and then are melted over and go through the same process again. But the good ones are not finished yet. They are next put into a keg-like cylinder along with some plumbago—and by the way this plumbago comes all the way from the island of Ceylon on purpose—the cylinder is set to revolving very fast, and in a short time they come out beautifully polished and aij ready to be screened. The screening is to separate the different sizes from each other, for several different sizes are made, ranging from buck-shot down to a tiny little ball no larger than a cabbage-seed, and of which it must take several to do much execution. They are now ready to put up for market, and this is not the least interesting part of the whole. Little bags, large enough to hold twenty-five pounds, are hung just below some long iron tubes through which the shot runs and falls into the bags, and when just twenty-five pounds have run in a valve closes, and not another grain can get through. So you see they weigh themselves. Then they are piled into a heap and are ready to be sold, and to go out into the world upon their mission of destruction. Upon the lower story of the building is the immense engine of three hundred horse-power which turns all the machinery and does a large part of the whole work, a mighty servant that labors night and day, only stopping to rest for a few minutes once in a while, never gets tired nor out of humor, never grumbles nor scolds, I never strikes for higher wages, and only asks to be fed and attended to with proper care. This is a very imperfect description of a very curious and interesting process. To understand it thoroughly one must have some knowledge of machinery and of chemistry, and then he «an spend a delightful day in going overthe immense building and searching out its intricacie® —Chicago Advance.