Bluetooth is named after a Viking king. Not a metaphor, not a backronym β an actual 10th-century Danish monarch, Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, whose runic initials are still printed on the logo of every pair of earbuds sold today. It was supposed to be a placeholder. Nobody got around to replacing it.
The codename that shipped
In 1997, Intel engineer Jim Kardach was working on a short-range radio project alongside teams at Ericsson and Nokia. All three companies had their own competing wireless efforts, and the whole point of the collaboration was to stop that β one specification, one radio, one certification programme, so that a headset from one vendor would talk to a phone from another.
Kardach had been reading Frans Gunnar Bengtsson's historical novel The Long Ships, set in the Viking age. Harald Gormsson, king of Denmark from around 958, is remembered for uniting the warring Danish tribes into a single kingdom and bringing Norway under the same rule β consolidation being the whole of his historical reputation. Kardach proposed the name as a working codename: a technology built to unite rival wireless standards, named after the king who united rival tribes.
The intent was that marketing would replace it before launch. The shortlist that was supposed to win included names like "PAN" (Personal Area Network), which ran into trademark problems. Deadlines arrived, the placeholder was already on every internal document, and Bluetooth went out to the world as the real name.
The logo is his initials
The nicest detail is the one almost nobody notices. The Bluetooth logo is not an abstract mark β it is a bind rune, two Younger Futhark runes overlaid into a single glyph. The runes are αΌ (Hagall) and α (Bjarkan), standing for H and B: Harald BlΓ₯tand.
As for the nickname itself, the most common explanation is a dead or discoloured tooth. Another reading is that "blΓ₯" in Old Norse could mean dark rather than blue, and that "Bluetooth" may be a later, somewhat garbled rendering. The etymology is genuinely disputed. What is not disputed is that the engineers picked the name knowingly, and that the runes on the logo were deliberate.
Why the naming actually reflects the engineering
It would be easy to file this under trivia, but the origin story maps onto why the standard succeeded. Bluetooth won its slot not by being technically superior to every alternative but by being a unification play: a royalty-free specification, a single interoperability certification, and a radio design that could be manufactured once and sold worldwide. Interoperability was the product.
That legacy is why Bluetooth Low Energy now sits underneath so much of the connected-device landscape. BLE is what you reach for when a device needs to run for a year on a coin cell, talk to a phone with no infrastructure in between, and be commissioned by a non-technical user standing next to it. Wearables, asset tags, smart locks, medical peripherals, environmental sensors, and nearly every "hold your phone near the device to set it up" flow are BLE underneath.
Choosing the radio, not the brand
In practice, the interesting question in an IoT project is rarely "should we use Bluetooth" in the abstract. It is a power-and-range trade:
- BLE β metres to tens of metres, very low power, phone as the gateway, excellent for commissioning and short-range telemetry. Weak when there is no phone or hub nearby.
- Wi-Fi β building-scale, high bandwidth, needs existing infrastructure and a meaningfully larger power budget. Fine on mains, painful on batteries.
- LoRa / LPWAN β kilometres, tiny data rates, years on a battery. Right for field telemetry, wrong for anything interactive.
Most connected products end up using more than one. A sensor might use BLE for setup and diagnostics and LoRa or Wi-Fi for the actual data path, because the constraints on those two jobs are completely different.
That is usually the first real conversation we have with clients here in the Philippines when a prototype needs to become a product: not which brand of radio, but what the power budget, range, and commissioning experience actually demand. If you are working through that trade-off on a connected device or a thesis prototype, get in touch β it is a much cheaper conversation to have before the PCB is laid out than after.
Meanwhile, the placeholder codename endures. A thousand-year-old Danish king is stamped, in runes, on roughly every consumer electronics device on earth.
