text: MetropolitanVickers was a British heavy industrial firm, wellknown 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 and Education 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 the 1920s, the post of librarian was held by Lucy Stubbs, a former assistant librarian at the University of Birmingham, and past member of the first standing committee of ASLIB. Stubbs did not possess scientific qualifications, maintaining that a librarian, if assisted by other technical staff, did not need to understand science or engineering. In 1929, James Steele Park Paton reorganised and expanded the section with Dent succeeding Stubbs as technical librarian on 6January 1930. She joined the scientific and technical staff as was one of only two senior women in the research department, and in contrast to Stubbs, was employed principally for her technical skills.
  Dent was honorary secretary to the founding committee for the ASLIB Lancashire and Cheshire branch from 1931 to 1936. In 1932, the branch had twentysix members and had organised four meetings, including one addressed by Sir Henry Tizard, the then President of ASLIB. After the war, it formed the basis for the Northern Branch of the association. 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, Dent reported that the MetropolitanVickers library had three thousand 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.
  Dent continued to publish papers in applied mathematics and contribute to papers on emerging computational technologies. In "" (1935), she developed a detailed reduced major axis method for line fitting that built on the work of Robert Adcock and Charles Kummell. In 1937, David Myers, then at the Engineering Laboratory at the University of Oxford, asked Douglas Hartree and Arthur Porter to calculate the space charge limitation of secondary current in a triode. The calculations relied on some initial numerical integrations that were carried out by Dent on a differential analyser. The results corresponded closely to those obtained experimentally by Myers at Oxford. Her knowledge of higher mathematics meant that she was asked to check the mathematics in papers for publication by engineers at MetropolitanVickers. For example, Cyril Frederick Gradwell, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, asked her to scrutinise the algebraic part of his work in "" (1950). She would later analyse the problem of stress distribution in a thick disk based on a method devised by Philip Pollock, for Richard William Bailey, the former director of the mechanical, metallurgical, and chemical sections of the research department at MetropolitanVickers.
  Dent was a delegate at the fourteenth International Conference on Documentation and was invited to the Government's conference dinner on 22September 1938 at the Great Dining Hall of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1939, she was elected to the editing committee of the ASLIB book list. In 1944, she was put in charge of the women working in the research department laboratory at MetropolitanVickers, and in 1946, she was promoted to section leader of the new computation section. Her role would bring her into contact with Audrey Stuckes, a materials science researcher in the department, and a graduate of Newnham College, who would later head the physics department at the University of Salford. In 1953, they collaborated on an investigation into the heating effects that occur when a current is passed through a semiconductor that has no barrier layer. Dent suggested methods to solve the equations and computed the numerical integrations. In the following year, she developed the Fourier analysis in "" (1954), that calculated the optimal radial oscillations to maintain cyclotron resonance in a synchrocyclotron. The causes of axial spreading of the charged particle beam during extraction were also analysed.
  Dent joined the Women's Engineering Society and published papers on the application of digital computers to electrical design. With Brian Birtwistle, she wrote programs for the Ferranti Mark 1 (Mark 1) computer at the University of Manchester, that demonstrated that highspeed digital computers could provide considerable assistance to the electrical design engineer. Birtwistle would later have an extensive career in the computer industry, working at, amongst others, Honeywell Information Systems and ADP Network Services. In 1958, she carried out computer calculations for the mechanical engineering team at the Nuclear Power Group, Radbroke Hall. Their paper outlined a procedure for calculating the theoretical deflection (bending) of a circular grid of support girders for a graphite neutron moderator in a gas-cooled reactor. A general expression was derived from the central deflection of the grid and the maximum bending moment on the central crossbeam for a range of grid diameters.
  In 1959, and a year from retirement, Dent modelled a proposed Zeta circuit on the Mark 1 computer, for Eric Hartills paper on constructing a highpower pulse transformer and circuit. The cost of the computation was about two thousand pounds (), corresponding to around eighty hours of machine time. She retired from MetropolitanVickers in May 1960, with Isabel Hardwich, later a fellow and president of the Womens Engineering Society, replacing her as section leader for the women in the research department.