A red brick column tapers 234 feet above you, finished in 1828 as the tallest structure in the United States. The Phoenix Shot Tower rises 234 feet from its brick base, built with a million hand-laid bricks that taper from a base four feet thick to walls less than a foot thick at the top. The technology it contained was elegantly simple: molten lead was poured through sieves at the top of the tower, fell the full height in nearly perfect spherical drops as surface tension shaped each droplet, and was caught in a vat of cold water at the bottom.
The resulting lead shot was nearly perfectly round, which made it far more accurate in firearms than irregularly cast shot. The tower produced as many as five million pounds of shot per year for hunters and the military. The patent for drop-shot towers was held by William Watts of Bristol, England, who had invented the process in 1782 after dreaming that he was walking in a shower of lead droplets.
Baltimore's version was the largest of its type ever built. The tower operated continuously until 1892. It survived the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, which destroyed over 1,500 buildings in the downtown core.
Picture the molten lead falling that entire height, shaping itself into a perfect sphere before it ever touches the water below.