He worked at
AT&T's Department of Development and Research from 1917 to 1934, and continued when it became
Bell Telephone Laboratories that year, until his retirement in 1954. Nyquist received the
IRE Medal of Honor in 1960 for "fundamental contributions to a quantitative understanding of thermal noise, data transmission and negative feedback." In October 1960 he was awarded the
Stuart Ballantine Medal of the
Franklin Institute "for his theoretical analyses and practical inventions in the field of communications systems during the past forty years including, particularly, his original work in the theories of telegraph transmission, thermal noise in electric conductors, and in the history of feedback systems." In 1969 he was awarded the
National Academy of Engineering's fourth Founder's Medal "in recognition of his many fundamental contributions to engineering." In 1975 Nyquist received together with
Hendrik Bode the
Rufus Oldenburger Medal from the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. As reported in
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, the Bell Labs patent lawyers wanted to know why some people were so much more productive (in terms of patents) than others. After crunching a lot of data, they found that the only thing the productive employees had in common (other than having made it through the Bell Labs hiring process) was that "Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking'" (p. 135). Nyquist lived in
Pharr, Texas after his retirement, and died in
Harlingen, Texas on April 4, 1976. == Technical contributions==