As a pioneer of modern control theory and electronic telecommunications he revolutionized both the content and methodology of his chosen fields of research.

After the war, Bode along with his wartime rival Wernher von Braun, developer of the V-2 rocket, and, later, the father of the US space program, served as members of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of NASA.

His father was a professor of education, and a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by the time young Hendrik was ready for elementary school.

[1] He eventually applied and was accepted at Ohio State University, where his father also taught, and he received his BA degree in 1924, at age 19, and his M.A.

[1] Fresh from graduate school he was promptly hired by Bell Labs in New York City, where he began his career as designer of electronic filters and equalizers.

Sponsored by Bell Laboratories he reentered graduate school, this time at Columbia University, and he successfully completed his PhD in physics in 1935.

This provided engineers with a fast and intuitive stability analysis and system design tool that remains widely used today.

[15] With the inexorable onset of World War II, Bode turned his sights on the military applications of his control systems research, a change of direction that would last in varying degree to the end of his career.

He came to the service of his country by working on the Director Project at Bell Labs[18] (funded by National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) Section D-2), developing automatic anti-aircraft control systems, whereby radar information was used to provide data about the location of the enemy aircraft, which was then fed back to the anti-aircraft artillery servomechanisms, enabling automatic, radar-augmented enemy aircraft ballistic tracking,[19] in other words, automatic shooting down of enemy aircraft with the help of radar.

[18] The prediction of the coordinates was the function of director T-10, a form of electrical computer so named because it was used to direct the positioning of the gun with respect to the airborne target.

[20] Statistical analysis was also employed to aid in the computation of the exact position of the enemy aircraft and to smooth the data acquired from the target due to signal fluctuations and noise effects.

[18] Bode designed the velocity computing networks of director T-15 by applying a finite difference method instead of differentiation.

Although the Germans did have a trick up their engineering sleeve by making the bomb fly fast and low to evade radar, a technique widely adopted even today.

From July 17 to August 31 the automated gun kills rose to 1286 V-1 rockets, or 34% of the total V-1 number dispatched from Germany and 50% of the V-1 actually shot down over London.

[18] From these statistics it can be seen that the automated systems that Bode helped design had a considerable impact on crucial battles of World War II.

Inside the volume on fire control a special essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems, coauthored by Ralph Beebe Blackman, Hendrik Bode, and Claude Shannon, formally introduced the problem of fire control as a special case of transmission, manipulation and utilization of intelligence,[18][21] in other words, it modeled the problem in terms of data and signal processing and thus heralded the coming of the information age.

In 1945 it culminated in the publication of his book under the title of Network Analysis and Feedback Amplifier Design,[34] which is considered a classic in the field of electronic telecommunications and was extensively used as a textbook for many graduate programs at various universities, as well as for internal training courses at Bell Labs.

In 1955, he became director of research in the physical sciences, and remained there until 1958, when he was promoted again to become one of the two vice presidents in charge of military development and systems engineering, a position he held up to his retirement.

By the time of his retirement he held a total of 25 patents in various areas of electrical and communications engineering, including signal amplifiers and artillery control systems.

[1] He retired from Bell Labs in October 1967, at the age of 61, ending an association that spanned more than four decades and changed the face of many of the core elements of modern engineering.

Soon after retirement, Bode was elected to the academically prestigious Gordon McKay Professor of Systems Engineering position at Harvard University.

[36] During his tenure there, he pursued research on military decision making algorithms and optimization techniques based on stochastic processes that are considered a precursor of modern fuzzy logic.

[37] He also studied the effects of technology on modern society and taught courses on the same subject at Harvard's Science and Public Policy Seminar, while supervising and teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the same time in the division of Engineering and Applied Physics.

[38] Using terms easily accessible even to laymen, he analyzed and expanded on technical and philosophical aspects of systems engineering as practised at Bell Labs.

[38] He explained how seemingly different fields of Engineering were merging, guided by the necessity of the flow of information between system components that transcended previously well defined boundaries and thus he introduced us to a technological paradigm shift.

[39] As it is clear from the title of the book as well as its contents, he became one of the early exponents of technological convergence, infometrics and information processing before the terms even existed.

[14] After World War II, he explored the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay near the eastern shore of Maryland with a converted surplus landing craft (LCT) he had bought.