TECH HISTORY — SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2026

The Viking King Whose Initials Are Inside Every Pair of Wireless Earbuds

A rejected marketing name, a pub conversation in Toronto, and a 10th-century runestone gave the world its most successful placeholder

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GadgetGlow Bytes Editorial

Published September 26, 2026 · 9 min read · How we work

The short version of a much stranger story. Graphic: GadgetGlow Bytes

In late 1997, a better name was supposed to be coming. What shipped instead, seven months later, was a placeholder nobody had voted for, that a focus group ranked dead last, and that a company lawyer rejected outright. It's now etched into an estimated 7.5 billion devices a year by 2028, per the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's own forecasting. This is how that happened, and why nobody involved could stop it.

1

Three Companies, Three Names, and No Agreement

Key takeaway: By 1996, three of the biggest names in computing and telecom were each building an incompatible version of the same idea, and none of them had a name the others would use.

In the mid-1990s, cutting the cable between a computer and its accessories was an obvious problem with no obvious owner. Intel was working on something it called Business-RF. Ericsson had its own effort, internally known as MC-Link. Nokia was pursuing what it called Low Power RF. All three were chasing the same goal — a cheap, short-range radio link that could replace the tangle of serial and parallel cables strangling every desk — and all three were doing it under names that meant nothing to anyone outside their own building.

That kind of fragmentation kills a standard before it starts: manufacturers don't adopt three badly-documented internal projects under three different names. Someone needed Intel, Ericsson and Nokia talking under one banner, with a name engineers at all three could put on a slide without explanation. According to Jim Kardach's own account, that job fell largely to him, the Intel engineer working opposite Ericsson's Sven Mattisson and a small group from Nokia.

2

A Pub in Toronto and a Paperback About Vikings

Key takeaway: The name came from a bar conversation about historical fiction, not from a naming committee, a brand agency, or anyone whose job was to name things.

According to Kardach's account, republished in an EE Times retrospective he wrote years later, the spark came in late 1997, after Intel, Ericsson and Nokia pitched a version of their joint proposal at an unrelated industry meeting in Toronto and got nowhere. Killing time afterward, Kardach and Mattisson ended up at a local pub, and the conversation drifted into Viking history. Mattisson mentioned a historical novel, Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, which follows a Swedish adventurer through the era of Harald Bluetooth, the Danish king who spent the back half of the 10th century defending and expanding his territory against rivals, including his own son.

The detail apparently lodged. Back home, a book already waiting on Kardach's shelf — Gwyn Jones's The Vikings — happened to include a photograph of the Jelling stone, the runic monument King Harald raised around 965 CE. Its inscription, as translated in the book, reads roughly: "King Harald had this memorial made for Gorm his father and Thyri his mother: that Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes Christian." A king who welded several fractious territories into one kingdom, while Kardach was trying to weld three fractious companies into one wireless standard, struck him as too neat a parallel to pass up. He needed a codename the three companies could use while marketing found something official. He picked Bluetooth.

3

Selling a Joke to a Room Full of Engineers

Key takeaway: Nearly everyone whose job it was to evaluate the name — a lawyer, a boss, a focus group — rejected it. It survived anyway, because by the time their objections landed, it was already on every slide.

Kardach built a presentation deck with an altered image of the Jelling runestone on the cover, King Harald redrawn holding a laptop and a cellphone, and started showing it to the people whose approval he needed. It did not go smoothly. His own manager, Phil Wennblom, reportedly called it "a horrible name" and noted Intel's convention was to name codenames after North American geographic features, not medieval Scandinavian kings. Kardach has since described treating that objection as tacit permission rather than a veto, and moving ahead anyway. Intel's legal department was blunter still, in Kardach's retelling: name it after a river.

None of that stopped the codename from being on the table in December 1997, when representatives of Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, IBM and Toshiba met in Lund, Sweden to formally organize what would become the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. Every page of the deck Kardach and marketing manager Simon Ellis presented that day carried the altered runestone image. According to Kardach, the room's first reaction — a 10th-century king who unified Scandinavia, versus a standard meant to unify the PC and cellular industries — was silence, followed almost immediately by a debate about what the group's real, permanent name should be. Bluetooth was scaffolding, never meant to stick. Marketing ran a formal naming process afterward, with international focus groups testing alternatives including RadioWire, Personal Area Networking (PAN), Conductor, and, as Kardach recounts with some bemusement, Flirt, pitched as "getting close without touching." Bluetooth tested worst of all the candidates; several focus-group participants associated the word directly with dental problems.

4

The Name That Was Supposed to Be Temporary

Key takeaway: The industry chose a different, more conventional name on paper. A trademark search killed it three weeks before launch, with no time left to pick anything but the codename everyone already knew.

By spring 1998, the naming process had a winner, at least officially: PAN, for Personal Area Networking, which Kardach says the SIG's leadership voted to adopt on May 5, 1998, ahead of a launch planned for later that month, alongside the founding announcement naming what would become nine Promoter-level companies — Intel, Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Toshiba, and, joining shortly after, 3Com, Lucent, Microsoft and Motorola, per the group's own contemporaneous press materials. What derailed PAN was not a change of heart but trademark law: a clearance search turned up on the order of 1,700 existing conflicts for "PAN," according to Kardach — enough to make the name legally unusable on any reasonable timeline. That search came back roughly three weeks before launch, with marketing materials already in production.

The only candidate that had already cleared a trademark search, because it had never been treated as more than an internal codename, was Bluetooth. With no time to clear anything else, the SIG launched under the placeholder in May 1998, planning — per Kardach — to replace it once the dust settled. It never happened. Press coverage used the word Bluetooth because that was the only name in the announcement, and by the time marketing regrouped, the name had already accumulated the one thing a naming process can't manufacture on demand: recognition. A later internal marketing recommendation, as Kardach quotes it, concluded that Bluetooth had "already established a strong association with short-range wireless technology within our targeted industries" and changing it now would cost more than it saved. On that logic, the joke became the trademark.

The logo settled the same way the name had — by leaning into the Viking framing rather than away from it. The mark used on Bluetooth devices today merges two characters from the Younger Futhark runic alphabet, Hagall and Bjarkan, which correspond to the H and B in Harald Bluetooth's own initials, into a single bind rune, according to the Bluetooth SIG's own account of its origin. It is, as far as consumer technology branding goes, one of the more literal pieces of visual history hiding in plain sight on a phone's status bar.

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What the sources don't quite say out loud is how close this came to being a cautionary tale instead of an origin story. Every institutional check meant to stop a company from shipping something embarrassing — a manager's judgment, a legal review, a market-research focus group — looked at "Bluetooth" and said no. It survived because a standards consortium under deadline pressure ran out of safer options, not because anyone involved was confident it was right. That's an uncomfortable lesson for anyone who works in branding: the process worked exactly as designed, flagged the name as a mistake at every stage, and lost anyway to a printing deadline and a trademark search on a rival name. It's also likely why engineers retell this story more than marketers do — it's a rare record of the unglamorous, deadline-driven mechanics behind a global standard's identity, rather than the tidy version companies usually put out after the fact.

What we still don't know: Kardach's account is the only detailed first-person record of the internal debate, written and republished years later from memory; neither Ericsson's nor Nokia's engineers from that period appear to have published a competing version. The exact date the SIG was legally constituted is also reported inconsistently — Kardach centers on the December 1997 Lund meeting and May 1998 launch, while other sources place formal incorporation later that year, the usual ambiguity in standards bodies between a founding meeting, a public unveiling, and paperwork.

5

From Placeholder to Five Billion Devices a Year

Key takeaway: The accidental name is now attached to a specification still actively being extended for uses King Harald's engineers, if he'd had any, could not have imagined.

Twenty-eight years on, the placeholder is the brand, and the technology has moved well past replacing a cable between a phone and a headset. The Bluetooth SIG's own 2024 market update forecasts total annual shipments growing at roughly an 8% compound annual rate through 2028, reaching about 7.5 billion devices in a single year, with peripherals like earbuds, trackers and smart-home sensors driving most of the growth. A separate SIG update reported in 2025 put that year's shipments above 5.3 billion units, trending toward nearly eight billion by 2029 — broadly consistent with the 2024 figures, even though the two reports don't use identical categories.

The specification itself keeps expanding to match. LE Audio, the current-generation audio architecture, underpins Auracast, a broadcast-audio feature that lets a single source — a gate announcement, a gym's TV, a lecture hall's microphone — be picked up by any number of nearby earbuds or hearing aids simultaneously, something the original point-to-point design was never built for. The Bluetooth SIG's own look ahead to 2026 highlights Channel Sounding, a distance-ranging feature accurate enough for digital car keys and asset tracking, alongside work on higher-throughput audio links and sub-millisecond-latency game controllers — all running under a name that was never supposed to survive its first press release. King Harald united two kingdoms he could physically stand in. His initials now sit, unrecognized by nearly everyone using them, inside a wireless standard uniting billions of devices he could not have described in any language available to him.

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Sources

• Bluetooth SIG — Origin of the Bluetooth Name and Logo (primary)
• Jim Kardach — Naming Bluetooth (first-person account) (primary)
• EE Times — Tech History: How Bluetooth Got Its Name
• Intel Newsroom archive — Bluetooth SIG Promoter Group announcement, 1999 (primary)
• Wikipedia — Bluetooth Special Interest Group
• Bluetooth SIG — 2024 Bluetooth Market Update (primary)
• Bluetooth SIG — Industry experts on Bluetooth trends for 2026 (primary)

Historical dates and figures verified September 26, 2026 and subject to differing accounts between sources, as noted in the article. GadgetGlow Bytes does not receive products from manufacturers for coverage and did not conduct hands-on testing for this piece.