page_title: Beryl May Dent
section_title: Metropolitan-Vickers
hierarchical_section_title: Beryl May Dent / Career / Metropolitan-Vickers
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Analyseur différentiel exposé au Museum of Science and Industry de Manchester.
context_page_description: Beryl May Dent MIEE, was a British mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analog and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. A graduate of the University of Bristol, Dent wrote her master's thesis on the forces between atoms and ions, with the objective of calculating theoretically the properties of carbonate and nitrate crystals. Later work has shown that the results she obtained had direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations.
  In 1930, she joined Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company Ltd, Manchester, as a technical librarian for the scientific and technical staff of the research department. She contributed to papers on numerical methods for solving differential equations by the use of the differential analyser that was built for the University of Manchester and Douglas Hartree. She was the first to develop a detailed reduced major axis method for the best fit of a series of data points.
context_section_description: Metropolitan-Vickers was a British heavy industrial firm, based at Trafford Park, Manchester. They were well known for industrial electrical equipment and generators, street lighting, electronics, steam turbines and diesel locomotives. They built the Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistorised computer. In 1917, a research department was established at the Trafford Park site, when the care of the library came within the remit of James George Pearce. He made the library the centre of a new technical intelligence section. In 1929, the technical intelligence section was substantially reorganised and expanded, and placed under the directorship of James Steele Park Paton. Dent joined the research department in January 1930 as one of only two women on the senior scientific and technical staff. Technical librarianship emerged as a new scientific career in interwar Britain and rapidly became one of the few types of professional industrial employment that was routinely open to both women and men.
  By 1933, the Metropolitan-Vickers library had 3,000 engineering volumes and around the same number in pamphlets and patent specifications. Besides covering electrical subjects, the library covered accountancy, employment questions, and subjects of interest to the sales department. It also issued a weekly bulletin, scrutinised patents, handled patents taken out by research staff, and exchanged information with associated companies. From 1931 to 1936, Dent was honorary secretary to the founding committee for the northern branch of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB). She was also a delegate at the fourteenth International Conference on Documentation and was invited to the Government's conference dinner on 22 September 1938 at the Great Dining Hall of Christ Church, Oxford. She served on various ASLIB committees and made conference presentations detailing the workings of different aspects of the company's library and information service.
  Dent continued to publish papers in applied mathematics and contribute to papers on emerging computational technologies. In Dent (1935), On observations of points connected by a linear relation, she developed a detailed reduced major axis (RMA) method for line fitting that built on the work of Adcock (1878) and Kummell (1879). In Myers, Hartree, and Porter (1937) she provided the key numerical integrations for differential equations to aid in the calculation of the space charge limitation of secondary current using a differential analyser. In 1946, Dent was promoted to section leader of the company's new computation section. Her knowledge of higher mathematics meant that Dent was often asked to check the mathematics in papers for publication by engineers at Metropolitan-Vickers. For example, Cyril Frederick Gradwell, himself a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, asked Dent to scrutinise the algebraic part of his work in Gradwell (1950).
  In the latter half of her career, Dent became the section leader for the women in the research department that were working on semiconducting materials. She joined the Women's Engineering Society and published several papers on the application of digital computers to electrical design. With Brian Birtwistle, she wrote programs for the Manchester University Ferranti Mark 1, that demonstrated that high speed digital computers could provide considerable assistance to the electrical design engineer. Dent retired from Metropolitan-Vickers in 1960 with Isabel Hardwich, later a fellow and president of the Women's Engineering Society, replacing her as section leader for the women in the research department.
caption: Differential analyser designed by Douglas Hartree, at Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.
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