Fred Kimble was known as the inventor of the first pitch and tar clay targets and was probably the greatest duck shooter and one of the best clay pigeon and live bird shooters ever. He built the first cold storage plant for eggs and was a world class checker player and a wonderful landscape painter.  He was inducted into the ATA Hall of Fame back in 1969 with the first induction class of 15, along with legends like Annie Oakley, JAR Elliott, Elmer Shaner, William Crosby, Homer Clark, Fred Gilbert, Rolla Heike's, George Ligowsky, Tom Marshall, George McCarty, Plinky Topperwein, Lela Hall Frank and his two biggest rivals, Capt. A.H. Bogardus and Tom Marshall. 

Dick Baldwin wrote in Trap and Field in 2001:
"He was very musically inclined, and by age six, he could play both the violin and accordion. In 1852 his father was taken by "gold fever," and the family moved to San Francisco. A theater owner there learned of young Kimble's cleverness with the accordion and offered him a chance to play at $50 a week. The majority of the audiences were gold miners, 25 cents was the smallest piece of change they had. After Fred’s performance, they tossed handfuls of coins on the stage. He made $550.00 in tips in the first week he played. At age eight, he was playing violin in the best bordello in San Francisco.

Kimble was born in Illinois before the Civil War in 1846 and died before World War II in 1941. He was still an active member of the Union Pacific Gun Club when he was 90 years old. He died in California. However, he was best known for the invention of the choke bore in your trap gun and favorite hunting piece.

From his own words this is how Kimble invented the choke bore for a shotgun:

In the year 1868 I lived at Ghillicothe, eighteen miles north of Peoria, Illinois, on the Illinois River. The river bottoms were low and marshy on the opposite side, and the best of duck shooting was to be found there. Mr. Long (author of 'American Wildfowl Shooting') came west from his home in Boston, and located there for the season. We had some good duck shooting together, much of it in tall timber. Unfortunately, we had forty-yard guns while we needed sixty, but at that time I do not believe such a gun was known. Joe returned to his home in Boston when the shooting season was over, promising to come back the following year, when we planned to go south for a winter's hunting trip.

0. P. Secor, of Peoria, was to make a new gun for me, and Joseph Tonks, of Boston, a similar gun for Joe. Mr. Long wrote me after retaining home that he had gone to work in Mr. Tonks gun shop. A sixty-yard gun was in my mind, and I resolved to try some experiments in gun boring. Finding a musket with a good heavy barrel, I bored it out a true cylinder to start with, and then tried it out at forty yards with an ounce of shot. It scattered over five feet. Next I relieved the muzzle, as practiced by English gun makers at that time, and reduced the spread to about four feet, which was the best I could do under that plan.

Now we come to the first choke, though up to that time I had never heard the term used. I bored from the breech up within an inch of the muzzle, giving it a heavy choke, as it would now be called. Then I shot it, expecting to blow off the muzzle. It scattered over seven feet, and I was convinced that I was working on the wrong principle. Others had no doubt tried the same thing with the same result and had discarded it. This was a muzzle-loader, of course, and to save taking out the breech pin again, I started cutting out that choke from the muzzle. When I thought it was all out, I tried it again, same distance, same load. When I walked up to the target I found the entire charge in a thirty-inch circle.

His old friend and partner Charlie Stock invented the coal pitch and tar clay targets in 1884 and every clay target manufactured since then are copies of this target. Others stole the patent. They named the target the Peoria Blackbird. It replaced the Ligowsky old red, hard, clay target made from clay.

Dick Baldwin wrote in Trap and Field in 2001:
Charlie Stock and Fred Kimble thought they had found a gold mine in the Blackbirds. Charlie’s gun shop was too small to handle orders, and Fred’s own barrel-making business had lost much of its importance compared to the excitement of target-making. Things were soon to change.

Big target shoots were being advertised, but there were no orders for Blackbirds. Imitators and infringers were cutting prices and getting the business.

On advice of counsel, a series of lawsuits began. Fred said, "I could win shooting matches but never lawsuits. We would beat the infringers in one court, and they would carry it to a higher one and keep it up until they wore us out.

"One company with a million dollars in capital started making exact copies of our target," Fred told Jimmy. "The president came to Peoria, and we offered to sell him everything for $35,000. He said he’d buy, but when he got home, his directors said no, that they would continue to fight us. Six years later and $20,000 poorer, they wore us out. We quit."

Addendum

Pattern & Choke Bore
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pattern and choke

Shot, small and round and delivered without spin, is ballistically inefficient. As the shot leaves the barrel it begins to disperse in the air. The resulting cloud of pellets is known as the shot pattern. The ideal pattern would be a circle with an even distribution of shot throughout, with a density sufficient to ensure enough pellets will intersect the target to achieve the desired result, such as a kill when hunting or a break when shooting clay targets. In reality the pattern is closer to a Gaussian, or normal distribution, with a higher density in the center that tapers off at the edges. Patterns are usually measured by firing at a 30 inch (76 cm) diameter circle on a large sheet of paper placed at varying distances. The hits inside the circle are counted, and compared to the total number of pellets, and the density of the pattern inside the circle is examined. An "ideal" pattern would put nearly 100% of the pellets in the circle and would have no voids—any region where a target silhouette will fit and not cover 3 or more holes is considered a potential problem.

A constriction in the end of the barrel known as the choke is used to tailor the pattern for different purposes. Chokes may either be formed as part of the barrel at the time of manufacture, by squeezing the end of the bore down over a mandrel, or by threading the barrel and screwing in an interchangeable choke tube. The choke typically consists of a conical section that smoothly tapers from the bore diameter down to the choke diameter, followed by a cylindrical section of the choke diameter. Briley Manufacturing, a top maker of interchangeable shotgun chokes, uses a conical portion about 3 times the bore diameter in length, so the shot is gradually squeezed down with minimal deformation. The cylindrical section is shorter, usually 0.6 to 0.75 inches (15 to 19 mm). There is no good mathematical model that describes how chokes work, making the design and manufacture for chokes more art than science. The use of interchangeable chokes has made it easy to tune the performance of a given combination of shotgun and shotshell to achieve the desired performance.

The choke should be tailored to the range and size of the targets. A skeet shooter, shooting at close targets might use 127 micrometers (0.005 inches) of constriction to produce a 76 cm (30 inch) diameter pattern at a distance of 19 m (21 yards). A trap shooter, shooting at distant targets might use 762 micrometers (0.030 inches) of constriction to produce a 76 cm (30 inch) diameter pattern at 37 m (40 yards). Special chokes for turkey hunting, which requires long range shots at the small head and neck of the bird, can go as high as 1500 micrometers (0.060 inches). The use of too much choke and a small pattern increases the difficulty of hitting the target, the use of too little choke produces large patterns with insufficient pellet density to reliably break targets or kill game. "Cylinder barrels" have no constriction.