@HomewithDean – Homily 02/05

I recently learned about a tower in the heart of Old Town Baltimore, Maryland. It’s a round tower with walls 4 feet thick at the base, made entirely of red brick. The tower is 234 feet tall. These days the tower is dwarfed by the modern skyscrapers around it but 234 feet is still quite impressive, especially for something constructed 195 years ago. In fact, when it was first built in 1828 it was the tallest structure in the United States. Today it is a Historical Landmark. Not because of its height but because of its purpose. If you didn’t know anything about it and were to give it just a passing glance you’d probably assume it was just a smoke stack rising out of some old factory. But it’s not. There is no factory beneath it because the tower itself was the factory. It’s called the Old Baltimore Shot Tower. It was a munitions factory, and in it’s day it produced 2½ million pounds of perfectly round lead musket shot—musket balls—every year. What I think the coolest thing is about a shot tower—and there were several of them all over the US back in the day—is how the shot was made. It wasn’t lead being poured into molds. That was old-school and tedious and a process full of imperfections. No, the tower was built so tall because shot was made by showering down droplets of molten lead at the top and allowing those drops to fall the entire height of the tower. On the journey down the laws of physics took over—gravity, surface tension, air pressure—and by the time these droplets completed their fall they had hardened into perfect spheres. Ingenious. So why have I told you this story? Well, in part because I’m a nerd and I think stuff like that is pretty cool. Also, probably because we just returned from the International Builders Show which itself is all about pushing forward innovation and finding the next ingenious idea. But on a deeper level, the thought of molten lead turning round all by itself reminded me of a truth about our universe—there is no such thing as a straight line. Straight lines are a human inven