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Shot towers were the late-eighteenth-century invention
of English plumber William Watts, who saw commercial promise
in his simple observation that raindrops, falling from
the great height that they do, were not shaped like teardrops—as
so often depicted in art—but rather like little spheres.
In no time, he had converted his three-story Bristol home
into a six-story shot tower, dripping molten lead through
a sieve from above into a well of water far below. The
result, thanks to surface tension and Watts' powers of
perception, was the first truly and uniformly spherical
shot, and a technological innovation of such elegant and
profound simplicity as to preclude virtually all subsequent
improvement.
Shot tower owner Thomas H. Selby arrived in San Francisco
in 1849 and became its mayor twenty years later. By 1870,
his 200-foot-tall shot tower at First and Howard was already
as prominent a contributor to San Francisco's burgeoning
industrial economy as it was to its skyline.
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