A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today — a zero-budget gift from fate: a word marketers called a failure, lawyers called unsafe, and a PR agency called an embarrassment now sits in your earbud settings. Every time your phone whispers “Bluetooth connection,” you are saying the nickname of a tenth-century Danish king who lived nine centuries before the first headset. And the name is confirmed not by branding with a tooth — but by runes. The story of how an Intel presentation joke outlived its own renaming plan, lawyers on two continents, and a PR agency that recommended burning the name.
Let’s start with the unexpected ending: the name Bluetooth was supposed to die. Twice. The first time — when Intel and Ericsson engineers were seriously preparing a replacement; the second — when, three weeks before the global announcement, lawyers found 1,500 conflicts in the databases. But the standard is still called Bluetooth, while no one remembers the “real” name that won the vote. And this is not a story of successful marketing. It is the story of how marketing lost every battle in a row, but default settings won the war.
Lund, Sweden, 1994 — though the seed had been planted earlier. In the late eighties, Nils Rydbeck, technical director of Ericsson Mobile, together with physician-inventor Johan Ullman, pushed for a budget to research a wireless alternative to cables. The money was found, the task landed on Tord Wingren’s shoulders, and he hired two engineers — Jaap Haartsen and Sven Mattisson. The assignment was humiliatingly down to earth: replace one wire. Not build the wireless age — remove the cable between a mobile phone and a headset.
By 1994, the research had taken shape as a project with the modest bureaucratic name MC link — “multi-communicator link”: a pocket communicator connects to a cellular phone over a short radio link, and the phone carries it into the network. But as soon as the radio worked on the prototypes, it became clear that the “last line” between communicator and phone could connect absolutely anything to anything else. Haartsen, incidentally, had no illusions about the competition: the infrared ports of mobile phones at the time had three fatal shortcomings — a range of a meter to a meter and a half, uselessness without line of sight, and a class hatred of a third participant. Radio went around corners, punched through a pocket, and could form a piconet — a network of one “master” and up to seven active “slaves.”
Ericsson’s problem was a classic telecom one: the protocol existed, the chip was in development — but where were they supposed to get their own phones or laptops? A standard living inside one company is not a standard. It is a portfolio experiment. The critical mass of devices sat at the intersection of businesses: phones — Ericsson and Nokia, laptops — IBM and Toshiba, silicon and software — Intel. That is how Intel’s platform group joined the conversation, where Jim Kardach worked — a mobile-platform architect, the man who was about to give the standard its name.
Kardach ran Intel’s wireless communications program for laptops under the internal name Biz-RF — the team instantly renamed it “Bizarre-F,” and that was the first sign: the subject lacked not technology, but a decent name. In the autumn of 1997, Intel and Ericsson tried to join Home-RF — the home-wireless consortium of the day — but were turned away: “too early.” So an alliance was born directly, Intel and Ericsson, two cultures — PC and telecom. The culture shock came right on schedule: the negotiations concluded not in a conference room but in a pub in Toronto, where after the sessions Kardach sat with Sven Mattisson — the very one from Lund.
And then came a scene impossible to invent again: the Intel architect asked his Swedish colleague to tell him something about Scandinavian history. The Swede gladly obliged — but he did not retell a textbook; he retold Frans G. Bengtsson’s novel The Long Ships (originally Röde Orm, “Red Serpent”) — an epic Viking bestseller set in the time of Harald Bluetooth. The novel’s backdrop was the late 900s: Harald Bluetooth against his son Sweyn Forkbeard, Danes, Christianization, longships. Sven threw in a bonus for Kardach: Vikings, incidentally, did NOT wear horned helmets — that was a nineteenth-century artists’ invention.
Then the story did what the best stories do: it intertwined world literature with an industrial standard. At home, Kardach opened historian Gwyn Jones’s The Vikings — and came across a photograph of a runestone from the Danish village of Jelling, captioned “raised by Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth...” The inscription on the stone read like a business biography: Harald “won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.” By Monday, Kardach had prepared a slide: a photo of the stone, Harald picked out with a marker, and three bullets — “Christianized the Danes,” “united Denmark and Norway,” and the crucial one: “Harald thinks notebooks and cellular phones should seamlessly communicate.”
The very next scene saw that slide become the victim of Simon Ellis, Intel’s marketing manager, who had worked with Kardach for twelve years. They were talking about renaming the project, Simon was listing the difficulties of finding a new name — and then Jim offered his. The first reaction was casual: Simon made a vomiting sound. Then, seeing the stone on the slide, he perked up: “Can you draw a laptop and a cell phone in his hands?” — and agreed: “I like it.” With one caveat, the caveat that decided everything: let it be only a code name. They would come up with the real one later.
From there, events unfolded like a systems-analysis textbook filmed as a tragicomedy. Kardach’s boss, Phil Wenblom, looked at “Bluetooth” and said: “Terrible name. We have a policy — projects are named after mountains and rivers in North America.” Kardach walked out of the office thrilled, feeling he had been approved — that is how the enthusiast’s filter works. Intel lawyer Brian Epstein — yes, namesake of the Beatles’ manager — tried to explain code names more elegantly: code name = river, lake, or town. Kardach bluffed that Bluetooth was supposedly the translated name of a German village. He got: “Nice try, no dice.” But a week later Epstein returned with news: nobody had a trademark on the word “Bluetooth.”
December 1997, Lund, the first in-person meeting of the five future founding fathers of the SIG: Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Toshiba. Kardach and Ellis presented “Bluetooth SIG” — slides with the stone, Harald with a laptop, “uniting disparate things into a single standard.” The partners’ reaction was a perfectly woolly silence. Simon pulled the team out of the awkwardness with a fallback move: “It’s only a code name, the original will come later.” Everyone nodded and began proposing the “real” name. At that moment, Kardach recalls, he and Simon exchanged a glance — and both understood that the battle had been lost before it began: the name had already won.
But that was only the beginning. The Lund brainstorm produced candidates worthy of the industry: Flirt — decoded as “Getting close without touching” (almost charming, but not chosen), Conductor — killed by an engineer with one sentence: “Conductor is also the metal end of a wire, and we’re wireless,” and PAN — Personal Area Network, too engineerish, covering only one of the three scenarios. In parallel, Intel held its own brainstorm with “naming czars” — the people who had coined PCMCIA, AGP, PCI, and Pentium. At stake — $500 from Simon for the official name. The winner was RadioWire. The vote was scheduled for the following week. Simon proposed postponing it — Kardach refused. Drama moved faster than bureaucracy: the vote was held, PAN won 4:1 — everyone against Intel. Simon told Kardach it was his fault and stopped speaking to him.
And now — the scene that makes the original account worth reading. Three weeks before the global launch. An emergency conference call: Ericsson’s lawyers discovered that “PAN” had no hope at all of registration — the search turned up around 1700 conflicts (later the SIG wrote of tens of thousands; as usual, the legend grows with every retelling). Nobody — not one of the five companies — had ordered a trademark search on their own name before the vote. The only name that passed the check without a single conflict was the one nobody had checked: there was no point checking it, after all, because “it’s just a code name.” Bluetooth won the contest for the official name without entering the contest — the only participant to have passed due diligence.
And so, on 20 May 1998, they launched — the five promoters announced to the world on three continents (London, San Jose, Tokyo) a technology “code-named Bluetooth.” The word “codenamed” in Intel’s official press release was the first sign of an uncertainty that could no longer be resolved: the name had fused to it for good.
The launch preparations were comical. Kardach and Ellis flew to the London announcement, met with Edelman the day before — and heard the official position: the name was disastrous, the recommendation was not to use it at all. It, in their words, “evokes images of poor oral hygiene” rather than “cool devices.” The agency feared headlines along the lines of “Bluetooth will drop like a rock,” accompanied by photographs of that very runestone, which the SIG had commissioned as press souvenirs. The souvenir order was a separate saga: Anders Edlund from Ericsson marketing was supposed to make plastic replicas, but instead made real granite — six-inch stones engraved with Harald. The American PR office refused to hand them out at all. The engineers’ answer: distribute the stones themselves, presenting them as a reward for joining the SIG.
At the same time, the name worked better than any advertisement — just not for the reasons marketers had predicted. LEGO, whose headquarters stand in Billund, roughly ten kilometers from Jelling, heard the word “Bluetooth” and declared it had a “patriotic duty” to join the consortium. Focus groups conducted after the launch showed zero recognition: people connected the name with nothing the technology actually did. And yet they remembered it — and Kardach, without quite understanding why himself, guessed that it was the combination of “weird nickname + aha moment, ‘it’s about a king’ + simplest possible use model, ‘replaces a cable.’” That is the Hollywood version. But the story is more honest: the name did not take off — everyone who was supposed to replace it simply set up a closed loop of mutual expectations, and by the time the loop opened, the name already had an army of users.
The stone’s final chord. At the end of 1998, on a business trip to Lund, Kardach was given an English-language brochure about Jelling with high-quality photographs. He scanned one picture for a new slide, and then Jeff Schiffer, the SIG’s regulatory lawyer, came into the office — and asked: “What are those holes in his palms?” The large Jelling stone does indeed depict Christ — with nail marks in his palms and the circles of a halo around his head. Further investigation confirmed it: without realizing it, the SIG had spent years making Christ the spokesperson for wireless technology — and Kardach recalled that, in a country where Beatles records were burned in the sixties, this was an especially touchy matter. The Danes were grumbling already: their national “baptismal” monument with a laptop drawn onto it was like graffiti on the Statue of Liberty. The image was quietly withdrawn from use.
Now — about the man whose name survived all of this. Harald Gormsson (Haraldr Blátǫnn Gormsson, Danish: Harald Blåtand Gormsen), son of Gorm the Old and Thyra Danebod, ruled Denmark from roughly 958 to 986, and Norway from roughly 970 as well. His life was pure engineering of state power: a network of ring fortresses with geometrically precise layouts (Trelleborg, Fyrkat, Aggersborg, and others, 970s–980s), the 760-meter Ravning Bridge on 1200 oak piles, the expansion of the Danevirke rampart. It was Harald who turned Denmark toward Christian Europe: by his own testimony on the Jelling stone, he “made the Danes Christian.”
And that inscription is the key to the whole story. Harald raised the large Jelling stone around 965 in memory of his parents. The translation leans slightly toward the patent department: “King Harald ordered these memorials made in memory of Gorm, his father, and Thyra, his mother — that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.” It is, in essence, the design document of Danish statehood: one stele — the achievements list; another — the 965 version. The Danes do not call Jelling “Denmark’s baptism certificate” for nothing — UNESCO confirmed it when it added the Jelling mounds, stones, and church to the World Heritage list.
Where “Bluetooth” came from — there is no precise answer, and the honest version is duller than the legend. The first written mention of the nickname appears in the Roskilde Chronicle around 1140, written as “blatan”; a late-twelfth-century chronicle explains: dens lividus vel niger — “a bluish or black tooth.” The Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore (ISOF) interprets blátǫnn as “a dark, bluish-black tooth” — and calls a darkened, dead tooth the most likely explanation. Imagine the standard portrait detail: not “the Conqueror,” not “the Great,” but a statement of a dental problem. The irony is that “Bluetooth” is not exotic at all: ISOF gives an entire catalog of bodily nicknames among Viking kings — Harald Fairhair (he vowed not to cut his hair until he united Norway), Sweyn Forkbeard (Tveskägg — “split beard”), Haakon the Red, Ragnvald Shortlegs. The medieval press was straightforward: praise the hair, mock the teeth.
Harald’s end was a saga-ready plot: his son Sweyn Forkbeard rebelled, the old man lost, and died around 985/986 in exile at Jomsborg. The unifier who had glued the country together fell victim to a family feud — and his name, a thousand years later, became a global brand, outliving both dynasty and kingdom, and the very meaning of the word “network.”
Since the name came from a runestone, the logo had to be runic, and the SIG delivered: the emblem is a bind rune made from two Younger Futhark letters, Hagall and Bjarkan, — the initials of Harald Blåtand. If you look closely at the Bluetooth logo on any device, both runes read as two superimposed strokes. No tooth, no blue, no crown, no Viking ship — only the letters of the king’s name. A rare case where a logo does not depict the object itself, but honestly says its name in the language of stones.
The marketing department did leave its tracks, though: on Intel’s original slides Harald held a laptop and a phone — an image journalists quoted a thousand times in retellings as a “ready-made metaphor” (and which then had to be quietly removed from the brand after Schiffer’s “discovery” involving Christ’s palms). Do not draw products onto national monuments. Especially not when the monument is a thousand years old and the country has its official birthday in the same place.
The story saved its final surprise for the lawyers. When Bluetooth SIG went to register the word “Bluetooth” as a trademark, the U.S. Patent Office once rejected it: the word had already become synonymous with short-range wireless technology, meaning it was generic — and generic belongs to no one. The SIG had to prove that it was they who had created that association — and ultimately defended the mark. But the fact itself is wonderful: the word achieved complete, absolute success — and for that it was refused recognition as property. The name could not be protected until it became a name. Once it had, it was too late to protect.
And the $500 for the official name? Kardach, by his own account, never received it: Simon said the prize was for the “official name,” while they launched with a “code name,” so — hold your breath. The standard that became a household name grew out of an unpaid five-hundred-dollar debt. If somewhere in Intel’s archives there is an invoice for $500 marked “Bluetooth” — it may be the most valuable receipt in the history of wireless communications.
The technology Ericsson’s engineers built to eliminate one headset wire now lives across most of the planet’s population: headsets, speakers, keyboards, sensors, watches, automotive electronics. BLE — the low-energy profile — put Bluetooth inside everything with a battery and ambitions. But at the foundation of all this lies a Toronto pub, Bengtsson’s novel, a stone from Gwyn Jones’s book, and a slide bearing a sentence the king never said: “Harald thinks notebooks and cellular phones should seamlessly communicate.” He did think the same thing, though — only instead of laptops, he had longships, Danes, and Norwegians. And in that sense Harald Bluetooth is the perfect patron saint of the standard: a man who spent twenty years turning scattered tribes into a single network. Only his network did not outlive its architect, while ours inherited his nickname. Both projects survive to this day: Harald’s unification became Denmark, and Kardach’s stray discovery in a pub became the most frequently mentioned king in technical documentation. The best names in technology are not invented. They are stumbled upon in books someone happened to remember in a pub.