In the mid-1950s from his
garage in Berkeley, California, a young graduate student named Donald E.
Bently perfected a transistorized design for a new type of distance
measuring device - an eddy current proximity transducer. While not a new
invention, the proximity probe had never been commercially successful
before that time.
In 1961, entrepreneur Bently moved his fledgling company to Minden,
Nevada, where it became Bently Nevada Corporation. It wasn’t long before
Bently’s transducer found its ideal application - inside machines.
There, it could observe the vibration and position characteristics that
are such important indicators of machine condition - characteristics that
had never been directly measured before. This sensor led to further
products such as instruments that continuously monitor the machine’s
embedded sensors and actually shut it down when conditions degrade to
dangerous or undesirable levels. That led to sophisticated data
acquisition hardware and software applications as well - applications that
allow users to visualize precisely how their machinery is behaving.