Bently named engineering landmark

Not long after the invention of the transistor, in the mid-1950s Don Bently put together a little device that would spark a multi-national company.

On June 20, representatives of Bently Nevada, former employees and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers dedicated the first mechanical engineering landmark in Nevada for non-contacting eddy current sensors.

The devices are used to continuously monitor rotating machine shafts, like those on generators or pumps, to determine potential issues with bearings before they fail catastrophically.

Employee No. 3 Roger Harker described how Bently took the first steps.

Bently, a Navy Seebee in the Pacific during World War II, obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Iowa.

“Electrical engineering in those days was motors and transformers, but he could see that things were changing, and he had a real love for control systems,” Harker said.

Bently moved to California and worked at the Rocketdyne division of North American Aviation.

“He took a job as a control system engineer to try and help out with the guidance systems on these early missiles,” Harker said. “He put together a circuit that had a very, very elegant design with two transistors and one diode. He engineered it to provide feedback on the guidance fin positions. He took it to management, and they said, ‘Bently, you don’t understand. We do things with hydraulics around here.’”

He got approval to use the design for other purposes and started handmaking the circuits in his garage in Berkeley.

“He always said the best business was mail order, cash up front, gold is better,” Harker related. “He pretty much stuck to that.”

Harker showed the device to the crowd at the dedication.

“He built these for a wide variety of applications,” Harker said. “There are virtually a million uses. One of them turned out to be shaft observation.”

When Bently left Berkeley, he drew a 200-mile circle on a map, and it touched Western Nevada.

“He came up and took a look,” Harker said. “He liked what he saw, and he liked the business environment, even in those days.”

Employee No. 4 Phil Hanifin told the group about the day Bently came into the lab.

“I was the only one in the lab,” Hanifin said. “In comes Don with this little Cheshire cat grin on his face and says ‘Want to have some fun?’ I’m going ‘this has got to be trouble.’”

Bently had him fetch a toilet paper roll and some wire and wrap 10 turns around the roll, they added a couple of capacitors, resistors and put together a resonant circuit with a coil about 2 inches in diameter. That circuit was used to determine if  a 1-inch probe could work and become Bently’s lates product in the mid-1960s.

“That to me really separated an engineer from an entrepreneur,” Hanifin said. “I’m an engineer. I want to do stuff I’m a little more comfortable with. Don was willing to take that risk. Don had a tremendous ability to grasp opportunity and take the risk and run with it. As a result of that, you can see the benefits. The risk-reward paid off hugely.”

June 20 was proclaimed Bently Nevada Day by Gov. Joe Lombardo.