james holden

Having mis-spent a significant part of my youth tinkering with electronics, I was the 10 year old boy who wanted, and got an oscilloscope for my birthday. With the scope in X-Y mode and a couple of function generators, you could produce Lissajous figures by sending different waveforms to the X and Y inputs.

These talented hackers used the stereo output from a PC sound card to drive a scope and did some amazing tricks. It’s all still done on the X and Y inputs though.

Last weekend, we visited some friends in Leicester and went to the Christmas steam day at Abbey Pumping Station. The massive engines were in steam, so I shot some video. It was nice to see them again - I haven’t seen them running for about 15 years since I used to visit with my Dad. The experience brought back a lot of memories.

Here’s a video I made of the engines running:

They were built in 1891 to pump sewage out of Leicester and up to the Beaumont Leys treatment works. Each of the four independent engines has an effective output power of 174 horsepower. Each flywheel is 21 feet in diameter and weighs 21 tons. They stretch from two floors below ground where the bottoms of the pumps are, to two floors above ground where the massive 15 ton beams sit. A steam pressure of 80psi is needed to run the engines.