Where the name bluetooth came from?
I’ve always been interested in creative names, particularly when old names are applied to new technology. Bluetooth entered the modern lexicon a few years ago, and is now ubiquitous. From music to Apple Watch to home monitoring, a recent survey reported that consumers now own on average four Bluetooth enabled products. Bluetooth creates a secure means of exchanging wireless data among several different devices, which opens up to all kinds of possibilities. My personal favorite application is listening in the car to Amazon audible audio books or listening to music with Apple Airpod's while jogging in the woods that I’ve downloaded to my phone.
But why is it called Bluetooth?
For the answer, we have to go back to the tenth century, a time when the Vikings ruled Northern Europe, and any kind of communication was primarily oral: the great Scandinavian storytellers passed down their sagas from father to son, and unlike the famous Latin and Greek poets, nothing was written down for future generations until long after the fact. The Vikings TV show, although it contains some historical inaccuracies, has sparked a lot of interest in Viking history and dramatizes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok.
Harald Gormsson, or Harald Bluetooth, was king of Denmark in the tenth century, and is best known for peacefully bringing together all the warring factions and unifying the country. When Swedish company Ericsson was developing short-link radio technology in the 1990s, one of their engineers was reading about King Harald and proposed the name Bluetooth, the idea being that Bluetooth unites all the different communications protocols into one universal standard.
King Harald did more than lend his name to a piece of 21st Century technology; the Bluetooth logo itself is made up of the runes ᚼ (H) and ᛒ (B), which are superimposed to create a bind rune. Although Norse literature was predominantly oral, runes had been around for centuries, their straight lines being dictated by the fact that they were carved into wood or stone.
So that’s most of my questions answered…except why was Harald’s nickname Bluetooth? Some historians believe that his teeth were stained from eating berries, but the more likely explanation is that he had a bad tooth which appeared blue. Not a very romantic reason to be remembered more than 1000 years after his death!
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