The Phoenix Shot Tower in Baltimore was erected in 1828 and stands at 71.3m, which at that time made it the tallest structure in the United States, as well as the world’s largest free-standing masonry tower¹.

The shot tower was invented by an Englishman in 1783, and soon spread across the globe as the preferred method of making lead shot for shotguns.

The process involves pouring molten lead through a copper sieve at the top of the tower, so that droplets fall the height of the tower, taking the form of tiny perfect balls during their descent. The lead then splash-lands in a water bath at the bottom, which sets the pellet.

These days shot is made using a centrifuge, so now only a handful of the once-ubiquitous shot towers exist worldwide.

The largest shot tower that was ever built is the 80.16m tall Clifton Hill Shot Tower in Melbourne.

Probably very impressive in 1882 when it was completed, but by the standards of today’s tallest towers, it’s tiny!

More info on shot towers at Wikipedia.

This is supposedly the Hokkaidō Centennial Memorial Tower in Nopporo Forest Park, Hokkaidō, Japan. The official site claims it’s 100m tall, and was completed in 1970 to honour the 100th anniversary of Hokkaidō’s official colonisation¹.

Of course dear geeky-reader, you will have already realised that this is simply an elaborate ruse.

Unmistakably, this is in fact Orthanc, the black tower of Isengard, atop which Gandalf was trapped by the wizard Saruman during The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

On the left, the Hokkaidō tower, and on the right, Orthanc.

The proof is incontrovertible, as I found both of these images on the Internet.

Thanks to photojennic.

The Skyneedle is an 88m tower in Brisbane, Queensland, that was constructed for the World Expo ’88.¹ During the course of the Expo the tower shone a beam of light upwards that could be seen from 60km away.

After the Expo ended the tower was supposed to go to Tokyo Disneyland, but successful local hairdresser Stefan Ackerie felt that the Skyneedle should stay in Brisbane. He felt so strongly in fact, that he bought it himself and had it moved just 500m to his company’s headquarters.

The tower light was originally only used on special occasions, as it could potentially cause havoc for aircraft headed to the nearby Brisbane Airport, but in 2006 an electrical fault caused a fire near the top of the tower, and today it’s unclear if the light works at all.

There’s a bizarre bonus sight at the back of Stefan’s building too - an 8.5m long tennis racket, which was purportedly designed as a giant catapult?

Just what hairdresser Stefan planned to catapult is anyone’s guess.

More information on Expo ’88 and The Skyneedle at Wikipedia, and Stefan himself at his corporate website.

Thanks to Ashley Thistlethwaite.

High above the skyline of the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, this incomplete tower stands testament to what can be achieved with an amazing vision and poor financial planning.

At 220 metres, it is only half of its planned height of 400 metres, which would have made it one of the tallest towers in the world. It was also planned to include a revolving restaurant - something to rival the 540 metre high Ostankino Tower in Moscow.

Although construction began in 1983, by the end of the decade it had ground to a halt, much to the dismay of investors, but to the infinite joy of thrill seeking base jumpers¹, made easier by the lattice-work of metal to climb inside. By 2000, the number of people tragically dying from the tower forced the authorities to weld the doors shut.

Today it remains, rather eerily over the city, as these photos show.

Thanks to Rudi.

This is the Homomomomonument, er… we mean the Homomonument, in Amsterdam.

Unveiled in 1987, the humorously-named monument serves as a very serious memorial to the many thousands of gay men and women who were murdered during the Second World War.

Homomonument consists of three pink granite triangles, which each form the point of one much larger triangle.

The eastern triangle steps down into the canal, pointing to the National War Memorial at Dam Square. The northern triangle points to the Anne Frank House, and finally the south-western triangle points to the offices of the Center for Culture and Leisure - the world’s oldest continuously operating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender/transsexual organisation.

More information about the Homomonument is available on the monument’s offical website, as well as on Wikipedia.

Thanks to romulusnr.

Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff, Wales, is named after everyone’s favourite Children’s author Roald Dahl who was born here in the Capital, and the word “plass”, meaning “plaza”, is a nod to his parent’s Norwegian origins.

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who or the Torchwood spin-off, then you’ll immediately recognise this as being the location of a spatio-temporal rift in time¹.

At the north end of the plaza stands a 21m tall water fountain (which hides the entrance to the secret Torchwood underground cave).

The south-east of the Plaza is home to the National Assembly for Wales, the Senedd. We looked for the Senedd before while touring the United Kingdom’s devolved assemblies, but it wasn’t finished then.

At the north-east of the square is the Wales Millennium Centre, a hall for performing arts. The front of the building has an enormous Welsh poem written across its entire face using the medium of windows. You can read the windows in Microsoft’s bird’s eye view imagery.

There’s more information on Roald Dahl Plass and Cardiff Bay on Wikipedia.

Thanks to AndrewAnorak, Jam, braddie, and Andrew Shackson.

Within the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona, is one of the largest stockpiles of discarded vehicle tyres¹ in the US - perhaps as many as 10 million individual tyres.

Despite being just south of a town called Goodyear, this is actually the work of a company called Envirotech Industries International, who have been collecting tyres here for the last 10 years.

The company used to recycle the tyres, and intended to start converting the old tyres into fuel - until the state of Arizona closed them down for multiple serious fire-code violations. Envirotech subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the State of Arizona responsible for the facility.

The imagery at Microsoft’s Live service has better resolution, allowing us to see individual tyres that have fallen from the huge piles (one of the breaches of the fire regulations was “Obstructed fire roads”).

If a fire were to break out here, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office have stated that it could “burn unhindered for over ten years”. To put that into perspective, in 1999 it took 250 firefighters 5 days to get a fire at a facility in Ohio under control - and it took a further nine years and more than $32 million to clean up the mess.

There are an estimated 3 billion waste tires stockpiled in the United States, and when they catch fire the environmental fallout can be catastrophic. Government reports stated that the pollution from the 1999 Ohio fire killed more than 10,000 fish in a nearby creek.

The Sonoran Desert National Monument is a small part of the 311,000 km² Sonoran Desert - home to several endangered species, and the most biologically diverse of all the North American deserts.

Read the full story at azcentral.com.

Thanks to kjfitz.

Giants have a hard time getting clean. I mean, baths aren’t usually built big enough to fit your average giant, right? Which is the only sensible explanation as to why there’s a giant sitting in the Guadalquivir river in Córdoba, Spain.

Here’s a few ground-level photos to quell the unbelievers.

Thanks to Jimbo.