Donald E. Bently

Bently was born in Cleveland, Ohio,[4][5] to Oliver and Mary Evelyn Bently. He had an older brother Oliver and a younger sister Alice.[4] His great-grandfather Benjamin Nye, one of Muscatine County's first settlers, built the Pine Creek Gristmill in 1848. It is now a historic landmark in Wildcat Den State Park near Muscatine.[6] Bently's father Oliver was a veteran of World War I and a farmer. Oliver bought a bowling alley when Don was 14, and Don learned to set pins.[7] He graduated from high school in Muscatine and was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II.[8] He served with the 141st Naval Construction Battalion (NCB) as a Seabee from August 1943 to April 1946.[9] His brother Oliver served in the U.S. Army Air Force in the troop carrier command from 1943-1946.[10]

The 141st NCB was stationed at Hilo, Hawaii. It earned battle stars for service in Luzon, Leyte, Saipan, and Tinian. Bently made four major amphibious landings during the war.[11] In June, 1945, all of the Battalion's units but Bently's company were detached for service on Samar island in the Philippines. His company of 224 men was instead ordered to Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, where it arrived on May 24.[12] The unit (known as ACORN: for Aviation, Construction, Ordnance, Repair) constructed a major aviation facility on Kwajalein Atoll.[13] The facilities were later used as a command center to prepare for Operation Crossroads.[14] In his free time, Bently began taking extension courses from the University of Iowa. His officer told him not to bother: "You'll probably be dead within the year anyway." The unit was preparing for the invasion of Japan when the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.[7] The 141st NCB was inactivated on January 2, 1946.[15]

He returned to Muscatine and attended the University of Iowa. While a student, he married Verna Francis Holt on July 3, 1948 in Muscatine.[16] [17] Upon graduation in 1949, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, after which he earned a master's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1950.[18] Bently worked as the lead azide and mercury fulminate assembly line primary detonator engineer at the Iowa Ordnance Plant in Burlington, Iowa.[19]

In 1950, he moved to California. He worked at the Rocketdyne division of North American Aviation in California for three years during which he did graduate-level coursework at UC Berkeley and UCLA.[19] At Rocketdyne he learned about electronic sensing technologies for aircraft control systems. He thought the technology had commercial applications in other fields and received permission to use it in his own endeavors. In 1956 Don left Rocketdyne and began experimenting with eddy-current sensing technology and formed Bently Scientific Company. He manufactured and sold eddy-current products via mail-order out of his garage in Berkeley, California.[20]

In 1960 he bought land in Douglas County, Nevada. In 1961, Bently relocated his company to Minden, Nevada, and incorporated it as Bently Nevada Corporation with three people.[21][22] A year after relocating to Nevada, he married Susan Lorraine Pumphrey on October 5, 1962.[23] They adopted a son Christopher and were divorced in 1981. Bently died on October 1, 2012, at his home in Carson Valley, Nevada. He was 87.

Bently began selling instrumentation from his garage via mail order in 1955. He organized his first business as Bently Scientific Company in Berkeley, California, in 1956. He moved the company to Minden, Nevada in 1961 and incorporated it as Bently Nevada Corporation with three employees. In 1958, a team from Pepperl+Fuchs had invented an inductive eddy-current sensor as a replacement for a mechanical switch.[24] But Bently's company was the first to successfully commercialize eddy-current proximity transducers, non-contacting displacement sensors measure vibration in high-speed turbomachinery. This type of electronic sensor is typically used to measure very small distances between the tip of the sensor and a conductive surface, such as rotating shaft.[25] The displacements measured are extremely small, typically only several thousandths of an inch. Bently's application of eddy-current sensor technology was the foundation of an entire industry.[26] Bently could be extremely demanding. He had high standards and did not compromise. He wrote, "Early in my career I decided that I would be absolutely true to my principles. This stand has led me occasionally to lose business, and sometimes lose employees. In the end, however, I have never regretted adhering as closely as I know how to a set of timeless principles. As I built my company, I demanded of my employees this same dedication to principle."[27] One employee was his executive assistant for 17 years, but he was well-known for dismissing assistants with whom he did not get along.

The eddy-current proximity probe pioneered by Bently became the de facto standard for the industry. In 1970 the American Petroleum Institute designated the proximity probe as the measurement device for measuring acceptable shaft vibration during factory acceptance testing. It added this as a requirement to its standard for turbomachinery acceptance testing and machinery protection.[28] The eddy-current proximity probe became the preferred method for assessing vibration and overall mechanical condition on large turbomachinery employing fluid bearings.[29]

Bently Nevada manufactures and sells asset protection and condition monitoring hardware, software and services for industrial plant-wide operations. Bently Nevada opened its first international office in 1969 in the Netherlands. It gained recognition as the leader in the field.[3] The company grew substantially over the years until in 2002 it had 1,200 people at its headquarters in Minden, Nevada, 2,100 employees worldwide, 100 offices in more than 40 countries, and global sales exceeding $235 million USD. In January 2002 at age 78 Don Bently sold the business to GE Energy for between $600 million and $900 million.[21][21][30] Its products are used world-wide to monitor the mechanical condition of rotating equipment in a variety of industries including oil and gas production, hydroelectric, wind, hydrocarbon processing, electric power generation, pulp and paper, mining, water and wastewater treatment.

Bently founded or owned a number of other businesses.

Bently was a leader of and major financial supporter of The Institute of World Politics, a graduate school in Washington, D.C., that offers education in statecraft, national security, intelligence, and international affairs.[41][42] Bently purchased the Marlatt Mansion and two adjacent townhouses for the Institute. For the first 15 years, he rented the building to the Institute for $1.00 per year. He paid several million dollars to gut and completely renovate townhouses next door and later donated them to the Institute. He also endowed the Donald E. Bently Chair of Political Economy.[31]

Bently donated several million dollars to Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, California, which in Spring 2003 named the Donald E. Bently Center for Engineering Innovation to honor his substantial contributions.[43] He supported local schools in Carson Valley, and gave generously to St. Gall Catholic Church, Carson Valley United Methodist Church, and a battered women's shelter.[44] He donated land for the Western Nevada College campus in Minden, Nevada, which named the building in his honor.[22]^:2

He helped fund the building of the new 38,338 square feet (3,561.7 m²) museum facility built in 2010 at the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum at Port Hueneme, California. In 2005, he helped create a conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy that preserved Kirman Field in northern Douglas County.[45] He also supported the Friends of Pine Creek Gristmill in Muscatine, the Muscatine Junior College and its Alumni Association, Muscatine Community College, the Lucille A. Carver Mississippi River Environmental Research Station Fund, and the University of Iowa.

In 1995 he received the distinguished research award for achievements in the field of rotating machinery from the Pacific Center of Thermal Fluid Engineering. Bently was recognized with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Frederick P. Smarro Award and the R. Tom Sawyer Award, and the N. O. Myklestad Award from the Technical Committee on Vibration and Sound of the ASME Design Engineering Division in 1997. He was a Fellow and Life Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 1992, he was made a foreign member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Engineering in Russia. The Board of Regents of the University and Community College System of Nevada recognized Bently as a 2002 Distinguished Nevadan.[3] Bently was named as Nevada's outstanding inventor in 1983. He was a Foreign Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Engineering in Russia (1992) and a Visiting Scholar of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China (1992). He was a trustee of the Institute of World Politics and a member of the ASME Industrial Advisory Board. He was the first person selected to received the Vibration Institute's DECADE award in 1992.[46]

Bently co-authored the textbook Fundamentals of Rotating Machinery Diagnostics which is used at major universities.[18] Bently authored more than 140 papers and articles dealing rotordynamics and/or condition monitoring technologies and was granted two patents.[33][18] Many of his articles were peer-reviewed and have been published in technical journals like that of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

• Bently Enterprises
• Bently Ranch