A closer look
Bluetooth technology was named after Harald Bluetooth, a tenth-century Scandinavian king who united diverse Danish tribes into a single kingdom, much like the technology was intended to unite various communication protocols. The famous logo is actually a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes for his initials, H and B. Intel engineer Jim Kardach suggested the name in 1997 as a temporary placeholder until marketing could come up with something better, which of course they failed to do. So now, every time you desperately try to pair your outrageously expensive wireless earbuds to your laptop while enduring a soul-crushing Zoom meeting, you are paying homage to a dead Viking monarch who probably resolved his connectivity issues by simply hitting people with a heavy wooden club. It is a wildly majestic origin story for a wireless standard that still routinely refuses to recognize your car stereo on Tuesday mornings for absolutely no logical reason whatsoever
