Friday, March 29

The Viking king who inspired the creation of Bluetooth | Digital Trends Spanish


It was in the early 1990s when Jim Kardash of Intel created the technology called Bluetoothwhich allowed to wirelessly connect electronic devices.

Once the function was ready, it had to be named, and the myth says that Kardash was inspired by a reading he was doing at the time: he was reading the book by Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long ShipsSwedish novel of 1941 that narrates the Viking adventures and how King Harald Blatand Gormsson managed to unify the Danish and Norwegian tribes under his reign in the 10th century.

For this reason, the engineer justified that this was the reason for using it as inspiration:

“King Harald Blatand was famous for unifying Scandinavia, in the same way that we tried to unify the PC and mobile industries with a short-range wireless link,” he said.

Who was Harald Blatand

King Harald Blatand was King of Denmark from about 958 until his death around 986, and King of Norway from about 970. He introduced Christianity to Scandinavia and his name meant “Blue Tooth”, so his English translation stayed as Bluetooth .

They also say that this name was attributed to him for having suffered the hemolytic disease of the newborndisease that would have made some of his teeth have a bluish color.

the bluetooth logo

In addition to Blue Tooth’s translation giving Bluetooth its name, its logo comes from a combination of the Viking king’s initials.

The logo combines the German runes of Harglass (equivalent to H in Latin) and Berkanan (analogous to B in Latin). The first consists of a vertical stick crossed by an X, while the second is made up of a vertical line with two adjoining triangles.

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