Every time you pair your headphones with your phone, you are actually invoking the name of a Viking king. "Bluetooth" isn't an engineering term; it's the nickname of a Danish king who lived in the 10th century. And the name was never chosen to last.
The blue-toothed king: Harald Gormsson
According to the Bluetooth SIG, Harald Gormsson was a king who united Denmark and Norway. According to Wikipedia he ruled Denmark from about 958 to 986; his hold over Norway was limited to a few years in the 970s and is more disputed. His Danish nickname is Blåtand, in English Bluetooth.
There is no certain information about the origin of the nickname. The Bluetooth SIG says the king had a dead tooth that looked dark blue-gray. This is the most common explanation and is also supported by a note about a "bluish or black tooth" in a chronicle from the late 12th century. But in 1997 a historian suggested the nickname might be a corruption of the "blue thane" (dark nobleman) used in England. So the "rotten tooth" story is charming, but not undisputed among historians.
Harald's most tangible trace is the great Jelling stone he had raised around 965 in the name of his parents Gorm and Thyra. The stone's inscription remembers him as the king who united Denmark and made the Danes Christian.
A meeting, a book, a temporary code name
The technology itself was born in Sweden. According to Wikipedia, Ericsson Mobile's team in Lund, guided by chief technology officer Nils Rydbeck, began working on a short-range radio link in 1989; the main design picked up speed in 1994 with Jaap Haartsen and Sven Mattisson, and by 1997 there was a working solution.
In the mid-1990s Ericsson, Intel and Nokia were trying to agree on a standard that would connect phones and computers wirelessly over short distances. The Bluetooth SIG dates this planning meeting to 1996.
The person who proposed the name was Jim Kardach of Intel. According to Wikipedia, Kardach proposed the name in 1997 after a conversation with Ericsson engineer Sven Mattisson. Mattisson had told him about Scandinavian history through Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking novel "The Long Ships"; Harald Bluetooth appears in the novel. Kardach's reasoning is quoted on the Bluetooth SIG site like this: Harald was famous for uniting Scandinavia, "just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries."
Sources give 1996 for the meeting and 1997 for the proposal of the name; the two don't contradict each other, the process was spread across those two years.
The logo is actually two rune letters
Look closely at the Bluetooth logo and you will see a "B" and a star-like mark intertwined. These are two runes of the Younger Futhark alphabet: Hagall (ᚼ) and Bjarkan (ᛒ). In other words H and B, the initials of Harald Bluetooth. Combined letters like these are called a "bind rune".
In short, in the settings menu of the phone in your pocket sit the letters of an alphabet from about a thousand years ago.
How did a temporary name become permanent?
The name spread quickly through the industry and there was no chance to change it. The Bluetooth SIG was officially announced on May 20, 1998, with Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba as founding members. The Bluetooth 1.0 specification was adopted in 1999, and the first Bluetooth device (a hands-free headset) was introduced the same year.
Reaching phones took a bit longer: according to Wikipedia, the first Bluetooth phone sold on the market was the Ericsson R520m, released in the first quarter of 2001. So the Viking king's name made it into pockets about four years after it was proposed as a code name.
On the technical side, the idea of "uniting" continues in a way that suits the name. Classic Bluetooth divides the band between 2.402 and 2.480 GHz into 79 channels and, with adaptive frequency hopping, typically changes channels 1,600 times per second. That is how dozens of devices in the same room can talk to each other without interfering much.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| 10th century: the king who united Denmark and Norway | A standard that unites phones, headphones, watches and cars |
| Runes carved into the Jelling stone | The blue logo on every device |
| The "Blue Tooth" nickname | From a temporary code name to a global brand |
A code name that was forgotten while waiting for a marketing team to come up with "something really cool" now sits on billions of devices.
Do you think this technology would be as memorable today if PAN or RadioWire had been chosen?