How a medieval king influenced a modern technology

He converted to Christianity, and then he made the rest of the Danes do it too, And he actually went so far as to give his father's tomb a Christian glow up. Because daddy was a pagan and Mama was a go go girl. His own son would eventually rise up against him. But what does all this have to do with tech, Well, it kind of has a little

bit to do with oral hygiene. See, back in the dark age, is not everybody was fastidious about brushing their teeth after every meal, and don't get me started un flossing, either dental floss or the outdated meme dance. And Old Harry got himself a gammy tooth, So it was a dead tooth, you see, and it sort of had this grayish, bluish hue. This gave rise to folks referring to him as Bluetooth. And this is where the word bluetooth comes from.

The word we use to name a wireless communications technology comes from a medieval Danish king with a gross dead tooth. This is not a joke, this is real. So why why is Bluetooth named after this? Well, it helps when you know that the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson developed the

Bluetooth standard. So Sweden has its own history of kings obviously, and Sweden is nestled between Denmark and Norway, to countries that old Harry stank Tooth ruled over, but Sweden was more of a region of different provinces around this time. It actually coalesced into a kingdom around nine seventy Common era, which was late into Harry Stinkytooth's rain. So maybe none of the Swedish kings had suitable nicknames that would work

as well for a technology. But the engineer leading the development of Bluetooth was doctor Yop Hartsen, whose name I know I have butchered and I apologize, but he was born in the Netherlands. That's actually of no help whatsoever. The Netherlands is on the other side of Germany from Denmark. Plus the Netherlands didn't become a country of its own until fifteen seventy nine, ages after Bluetooth was doing all of his unifying and converting over in Denmark and Norway.

So the name actually came not from a Dane or a Swede or a Dutch person. Instead, it came from an American, specifically an electrical engineer named Jim Kardak, who

was working as part of a consortium on this technology. Now, the story goes that Jim had been reading a great deal about the Vikings and that he had come across the story of King Harold Gormson and his Blue Tooth, and he thought that Harold, who worked to unite Norway and Denmark, was doing something similar to what this consortium was trying to do, but on a tech level, which was to unite PC and cellular devices through a short

range wireless communications protocol. Now, the story goes that Bluetooth was just a code name. It was not supposed to be the permanent name of the technology. But here we are, and we'll talk more about that in a second, but we got the fun name story out of the way. It's kind of like the too long, didn't read version

of this episode. But let's talk talk about the technology itself. Well, take another step back and we'll talk about what prompted this idea in the first place, and what role bluetooth plays in technology today and how it has evolved over the last several years. So back in around nineteen ninety four, doctor Hartson over at Ericson was working on developing technologies and standards for short range radio communications, and the idea was just to cut chords out of the equation, specifically

the RS two thirty two wired standard. You had all these chords and cables that you needed when you had a computer connecting to all these different devices. That's kind of a hassle. Wouldn't it be nice if you could eliminate all that tangled mess and have a wireless means of having devices connect and synchronize with one another. That would be great. I remember my very first MP three player. That one actually required a wired connection to my PC if I wanted to add more music to the device.

The same thing was true for personal Digital Assistance or PDAs. You would create your schedule and your contacts list and all that kind of stuff on your work computer. Then you would connect your PDA to that work computer via a cable and transfer the data over so that you could have access to that information while you were on

the go. One potential alternative to wires was using infrared transmitters and receivers, similar to how most TV remotes work, although we've got Wi Fi TV remotes and Bluetooth ones too, but you know, back in the day, it was all infrared, and in fact, there are devices that used these kinds

of methods to transmit data between them. You would connect a transmitter slash receiver a transceiver if you will, to your computer and you would use, you know, whatever device you had that also was outfitted with a transceiver to transfer data back and forth. But this meant you needed to have line of sight with the transceiver connected to

the PC in order to do this. So if you've ever used an infrared based remote control, you know that if you get too out of line with a television or a cable bucks or whatever it is you're connected to, the remote doesn't work anymore. Same thing if you're doing that in the middle of the data transfer, you're not gonna get a successful transfer of information. There was a problem to be solved here how to manage data transfers over short distances without the use of wires or line

of sight. You didn't need the communications to go very far, which would in theory mean you could find solutions that didn't require a great deal of power to operate. That was important too. Now, batteries have a limited amount of power storage, after all, and small batteries in particular have very limited power storage. So if you want something that's going to fit into like a mobile device form factor, it can't require a lot of power or it's not

going to be useful. Rapid charging was not really a thing yet, and you didn't want to drain all your devices every time. You just needed to share data between them. And so doctor Hartson got to work stone and experimenting with short range wireless transmissions. His work led to him experimenting in the two point four gigahertz band of radio

wave frequencies. So, just as a quick reminder, we typically measure radio waves in wavelength and in frequency, and these have an inverse relationship in that the smaller the wavelength, the higher the frequency. A two point four gigahertz frequency means that two point four billion wavelengths will pass a given point of space in a second. A two point four gigahertz signal is less capable than longer wavelength signals to penetrate hard reflective surfaces like concrete or metal, so

they tend to bounce off of these surfaces. But doctor Hartson was concerned with short range communications, so that wasn't a deal breaker, right, Like if the Bluetooth signals or what would become Bluetooth signals can't go through walls, not that big a deal. It wasn't intended to be a long range communications solution. He also wanted his solution to be very power efficient, so it wasn't like the transmitters were going to be blasting this out at high amplitudes.

One issue that he faced was that some Wi Fi protocols were already making use of signals in the two point four a gighertz band of frequencies, which meant any other protocol would need to account for potential interference with those signals, Like if you're all just broadcasting on the same signal, things are going to get messy. They'll just

interfere with one another. So doctor Hartson implemented frequency hopping practices so that Bluetooth devices could operate in the same environment as Wi Fi without the signals actually getting crossed. And I should also mention the name Bluetooth still was not in use yet, that had not become a thing.

So while doctor Hartson was working on these protocols that would become part of Bluetooth efforts, a few companies were forming this consortium to create a technology that had the same goals as what Hertson had over at Ericson, and these companies created what was called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or eventually it was called that it was a special interest group that didn't have a name for the technology. Initially this began with a collaboration between Ericsson and Nokia

and Intel. Around nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety eight is when this started to get moving. This was when Jim Kardak first proposed the code name Bluetooth for the technology. The Special Interest Group or SIG SIG would grow significantly, so today SIG boasts a community made up of more than forty thousand companies, Okay, the stage is set. We're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors, and we'll be back to talk more about the origins

of Bluetooth. We're back. So SIG, this special interest group surrounding this shortwave radio communications protocol, focuses on the task at hand. They build on Hartson's work, and they get closer to a point where they could launch a standard, but they remained stuck on the problem of what they're

going to name it. So originally the thought was they were going to call it Personal Area Networking in alignment with Local Area Networking or LAN and Wide Area Networking or WAN, but the acronym would be PAN for Personal Area Networking, and has it turned out a whole lot of folks were using PAN in other ways already lots of other trademarks related to PAN out there, so establishing

brand identity would be really challenging and probably litigious. So an alternative proposal was to call it radio wire, but the deadline to launch was rapidly approaching, and the team had not had the time to actually do a deep dive on a trademark search to make sure that radio wire wasn't going to conflict with any other existing trademarks,

so really having no other port in the storm. As they were getting close to launch, they didn't have any other option but to stick with the code name Bluetooth. Harold's gross dental problem would become the official name for this technology. Interestingly, it would also provide inspiration for the logo. If you look at the logo of Bluetooth, it's actually

the merger of two different runs. So one of those runes, if you were to look at it, kind of looks like an asterisk if you had stretched it a little vertically, and the other looks like an uppercase B. But the bee has sharp bits instead of curves, and they actually represent the initials of Hadrald Bluetooth. So it's a Viking H and a B combined with one another to make the logo, which I think is pretty cute. SIG released the first Bluetooth standard, also known as Bluetooth one point zero,

in nineteen ninety nine. The standard at that time could support a theoretical transmission throughput of around seven hundred and twenty one kilobits per second, and it had a broadcast range of just ten meters or right under thirty three feet or so these limitations meant that Bluetooth one point zero was not suitable for stuff like streaming audio. You could send small packets of data between devices, but it just really wasn't up to snuff for things like persistent

streaming connections between like a phone and some wireless earbuds. Also, when I say seven hundred and twenty one kilobits per second, that was just the theoretical throughput. In real world situations you would typically get much smaller or lower throughputs. And that's the case with any data transfer technology. You'll often hear one figure advertised and then in practice you'll find

that you get something very different. And it's just because ideally, if everything works exactly as it can at the best of its ability, you'll get that theoretical top end. It's just the real world rarely is ideal. Now, the first device is to actually feature Bluetooth chips, and them came out around two thousand. The very first phone to include it, at least as as far as manufacturing is concerned, was

the Sony Ericson T thirty six mobile phone. Makes sense, Ericson was behind this effort from the very beginning, but that was not the first phone to actually hit store shelves. That one would be the T thirty nine, and it came out in early two thousand and one. The aim of Bluetooth one point zero was just to serve as a wireless alternative to that RS two thirty two standard.

Lots of computer devices relied on that standard, from printers to computer mice, to external hard drives to modems, and again that adds up to a whole bunch of cables. So Bluetooth one point zero provided a chance to free users from the tangled web. The technology wasn't an overnight smash success though. For one thing, it was competing against Wi Fi protocols. Wi Fi, however, was much more expensive. Bluetooth, being a cheaper alternative could help manufacturers keep the cost

of production lower on their devices. The other big reason it took a while for Bluetooth to really take off is that it's rare that someone actually updates all of their equipment and devices at the same time, and it doesn't do you much good if only one half of the devices you need to pair together supports Bluetooth, so

adoption took a little time. With the introduction of Bluetooth one point one in two thousand and one, you could hold a voice call over Bluetooth, but the fidelity requirement for a voice call is lower than what you would want for music, at least for most folks anyway, so you still weren't really using Bluetooth to listen to music off a device. The features introduced in this update included

Bluetooth Headset Profile and the hands Free Profile. In two thousand and three, Bluetooth one point two would introduce the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile aka A two DP, which sounds like it's a Star Wars droid. This was the upgrade that would allow for actual streaming music and other high

end audio to wireless speakers and headsets. So really it was with one point two, which again launched in two thousand and three, where we started to really kind of see the true potential for Bluetooth as far as consumer devices go. SIG continued to evolve the standard. They improved it in two thousand and four with the release of Bluetooth two point zero. The big advance here was improved range of operation and data bandwidth. This version included support

for remote control devices for audio and visual technologies. An update in two thousand and seven called Bluetooth two point one included a much needed security update. So originally Bluetooth would broadcast out a device's address just willy nilly, it

just it had to. That was part of the the standard, and one early concern around Bluetooth implementations was that it could be possible for an unauthorized individual to connect to a Bluetooth transceiver that was in pairing mode, and that's clearly not a great thing if you want really good security and privacy. In two thousand and nine we got

Bluetooth three point zero. This allowed for high speed data transfers between devices connected via Bluetooth, and by high speed, I mean like twenty three megabits per second, which still is not it's not super fast compared to Wi Fi, but it was a huge step over earlier versions of Bluetooth. And besides, Bluetooth's purpose was to fill a specific niche in wireless communications. It wasn't to replace Wi Fi, it

was to augment what WiFi is already doing. In twenty thirteen, we got a split with Bluetooth, so one branch of the fork went with the longer range, higher bandwidth version of Bluetooth that we've been talking about so this version requires a little bit more power than the other branch of the fork. This would become low energy or l E Bluetooth. This alternative version was ideal for wearables devices

that had much smaller batteries. The LE Bluetooth protocol is more energy efficient and thus doesn't put too much of a strain on devices that have these small batteries. Both branches would get an update in twenty seventeen with the release of Bluetooth five, which added in more improvements both in data transfer bandwidth and in range. Bluetooth, particularly l E Bluetooth, is also used in a lot of Internet

of Things implementations. IoT devices communicate in small data transfers and require frequent or persistent connections, so an energy efficient

protocol designed for small data transfers is ideal. Recently, in twenty twenty two, SIG released new LEE Audio specifications allowing for low energy Bluetooth implementations with quality improvements for audio, and in twenty twenty three, Bluetooth five point four introduced synchronized communication between devices in a particular area using periodic

broadcast control. Now this is ideal for IoT implementations. You might have like a central control hub and hundreds or even potentially thousands of low powered IoT sensors all forming part of the network, and they might use this particular version of Bluetooth to transfer information between them because it has that very power efficient design to it, and throughout the evolution, engineers made sure to keep Bluetooth backwards compatible, so if one device supports Bluetooth five but the other

one is limited to Bluetooth three, these two devices can still talk to each other, which is a gosh darn good decision to make. So that's the skinny on Bluetooth, a very high level look at it, and I really think it's interesting to note that this thing was never meant to be called Bluetooth permanently. That was just kind of a code name, a funny little quirky thing to choose, inspired by a medieval Danish king with a nasty tooth, and that ends up becoming a formative wireless technology that

we use today. I love stories like that. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,