Itzhak Bentov

Itzhak Bentov
Born	Emerich Tobiás August 9, 1923 Humenné, Czechoslovakia
Died	May 25, 1979(1979-05-25) (aged 55) Des Plaines, Illinois, United States
Nationality	American, Israeli
Other names	Imre Tobiás, Itzhak Emery Bentov
Occupation(s)	Scientist, inventor, author
Children	Sharona Ben-Tov Muir

Itzhak "Ben" Bentov (also Ben-Tov; Hebrew: יצחק בנטוב; August 9, 1923 – May 25, 1979) was an Israeli American scientist, inventor, mystic and author. His many inventions, including the steerable cardiac catheter, helped pioneer the biomedical engineering industry. He was also an early proponent of what has come to be referred to as consciousness studies and authored several books on the subject.

Bentov was killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 shortly after takeoff from Chicago O'Hare Airport in 1979, which remains the worst non-terrorism-related aviation disaster to have taken place on US soil.

Early life

Bentov was born in Humenné, Czechoslovakia (in present-day Slovakia), in 1923. During World War II, his parents, his younger brother and sister were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

He narrowly escaped being sent to the camps and moved to British Palestine, first living on the Shoval kibbutz in the Negev.

Despite not having a university degree, Bentov joined the Israeli Science Corps, which David Ben-Gurion incorporated into the Israeli Defense Forces one month before Israel declared statehood in 1948. The Science Corps became a military branch known by the Hebrew acronym HEMED. Bentov designed Israel's first rocket for the War of Independence. HEMED was forced to make improvised weapons as there was a worldwide embargo on selling weapons to the Jewish state.

Bentov immigrated to the United States in 1954, and settled in Massachusetts. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1962.

Inventions

Bentov began with a workshop in the basement of a Catholic church in Belmont, Massachusetts in the 1960s. In 1967, he built the steerable heart catheter and attracted the attention of businessman John Abele, with whom Bentov founded the Medi-Tech corporation in 1969.

Abele later recalled Bentov's workshop,

He had the most amazing collection of tools. He had a chemistry lab, he had an electronics lab, he had a miller so he could mill and shape steel or wood or plastic, he had an extruder so he could work with polymers. He would literally make his own polymers or at least mix different polymers in order to get what he wanted. As a result, he was kind of a renaissance person, technologically as well as intellectually.

— John Abele

In 1979, Abele and Peter Nicholas looked to grow the successful business and established Boston Scientific as a holding company to purchase Medi-Tech.

Bentov was the holder of numerous patents. In addition to the steerable cardiac catheter, his inventions included diet spaghetti, automobile brake shoes, EKG electrodes and pacemaker leads.

Patents

Filing date	Publication date	Title	Patent No.
August 18, 1965	July 30, 1968	Means and method of converting fibers into yarn	U.S. patent 3,394,540
December 13, 1952	October 9, 1956	Method of making laminated plastic tubing	U.S. patent 2,766,160
December 14, 1961	November 17, 1964	Dressing	U.S. patent 3,157,178
April 23, 1962	January 28, 1964	Power transmission	U.S. patent 3,119,283
January 8, 1965	April 11, 1967	Pump	U.S. patent 3,313,240
August 7, 1968	September 20, 1971	Controlled motion devices	U.S. patent 3,605,725
March 24, 1966	October 28, 1969	Multiple conductor electrode	U.S. patent 3,474,791
November 5, 1958	February 20, 1962	Process of making surface coats for masonry building units	U.S. patent 3,021,573
March 12, 1962	January 26, 1965	Method of encapsulating liquid particles in thermoplastic shell	U.S. patent 3,167,602
May 16, 1962	January 19, 1965	Method of explosively forming fibers	U.S. patent 3,165,826
August 28, 1969	May 25, 1971	Anatomical model	U.S. patent 3,579,858
June 19, 1962	September 3, 1963	Means for administering medicine	U.S. patent 3,102,540
January 21, 1980	March 23, 1982	Dilator	U.S. patent 4,320,762
December 12, 1966	January 27, 1970	Apparatus for making tubes of bonded flexible strips	U.S. patent 3,491,756
November 24, 1958	August 28, 1962	Scratch masking coating composition for masonry	U.S. patent 3,051,678

Spirituality

Bentov was fascinated by consciousness, in particular how it related to physiology. In his 1977 book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, he wrote that "consciousness permeates everything".

He was a very inventive person, but also a person who was not the type you would normally think would be an inventor. He was a very spiritual person, he did meditation, he was a very soft-spoken person. He was interested in how the brain worked and actually attached electrodes to his head which were connected to a function generator in which he could change the wave shape and the power and learned about how the brain interprets these different frequencies.

— John Abele

Bentov's invention was a seismographic device to record the heartbeat, in particular the aorta's reverberations. Marc Seifer described the results: "During normal breathing, the reverberations in the aorta are out of phase with the heartbeat and the system is inharmonious. However, during meditation and when the breath is held, the echo off the bifurcation of the aorta (where the aorta forks at the pelvis to go into each leg) is in resonance with the heartbeat and the system becomes synchronized, thus utilizing a minimum amount of energy. This resonant beat is approximately seven cycles per second, which corresponds not only to the alpha rhythm of the brain but also to the low-level magnetic pulsations of the Earth."

Personal life

Bentov had a daughter, Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, with his first wife, whom he would divorce. Later he married Ukrainian-born sculptor and poet Mirtala Serhiivna Pylypenko-Kardinalovska (Kharkiv, 1929), also known as Mirtala Bentov.

Death and legacy

Bentov was killed on May 25, 1979, as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 191 that crashed shortly after takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. At the time of his death, he was traveling to California where he had been set to present his ideas on science and mysticism to a group of scientists from Japan. He was 55 years old. His daughter, English professor Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, wrote a memoir about her father, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives in 2005. It was not until after his death that she learned about his life in the Israeli Defense Forces and that he had created Israel's first rocket. Searching for answers as to why he never discussed this part of his life, Muir traveled to Israel and researched his years there.

Published works

• Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, E. P. Dutton, 1977, ISBN 978-0-525-47458-6; Inner Traditions – Bear and Company, 1988, ISBN 0-89281-202-8
• A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation with Mirtala Bentov, Dutton Books, 1982, ISBN 0-525-47701-2
• Micromotions of the body as a factor in the development of the nervous system, a centerpiece article published in the anthology Kundalini, Evolution, and Enlightenment by John White, editor, 1998, ISBN 1-55778-303-9
• A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness: A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation, Inner Traditions – Bear and Company, 2000, ISBN 0-89281-814-X

Further reading

• Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives. Bison, 2008. ISBN 978-0803216488.

External links

• From Atom To Cosmos: (1978 interview with Bentov) on YouTube
• Review of his work from an article that first appeared in PS-Magazine.com