We were pairing a new speaker last weekend and got into a small argument about what the Bluetooth logo is actually supposed to be. A lightning bolt? A weird rune? Neither of us was right, and it turns out the real answer is much better than we guessed.
The logo is a bind rune. Two Norse letters smashed together: Hagall (H) and Bjarkan (B). Those are the initials of Harald Blåtand, a Danish king who ruled around the 960s and is better known in English as Harald Bluetooth. He apparently got the nickname from a dead tooth that looked dark blue or black. Charming.
Harald's claim to fame was uniting the warring tribes of Denmark and Norway under one banner. So when Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia were sitting around in 1996 trying to name a new short-range wireless standard that would unite the warring tribes of phone makers, PC makers, and headset makers, somebody at Intel pitched "Bluetooth" as a placeholder codename. The joke stuck. The codename shipped.
The plan was to launch with a proper marketing name. RadioWire and PAN (Personal Area Network) were both in the running. PAN almost won. Then someone ran a trademark search, found PAN was already taken in too many places, and the deadline loomed. Bluetooth went out the door as the official name because nobody had time to pick somehting better.
The logo followed the same logic. If we're calling it Bluetooth, we may as well use the king's actual monogram. So they took the two runes, stacked them, and that's the squiggle that's been on every pair of wireless earbuds for the past 25-odd years. It's a literal signature from a guy who's been dead for over a thousand years, sitting on the side of our AirPods case.
Most tech logos are sterile. A swoosh, a gradient, an abstracted letterform that means nothing. Bluetooth is one of the few that has a real story baked in, and it's not a story anyone planned. A placeholder codename outlived its replacement. An engineer's history-book reference became a globally recognized symbol. The marketing team never got their proper name.
There's something nice about that. Some of the most recognizable design in the world got there by accident, because the people picking the temporary name happened to be reading a book about Vikings. If they'd been reading a book about, say, beekeeping, we'd all be saying "pair my Honeycomb headphones" right now.
If you've got a weird-origin story we should chase down for a future Friday post, send it our way. We collect these.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
