WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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I'm in the small village of Jelling, in Denmark.

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And behind me, in that central churchyard,

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are the Jelling Stones.

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They're runestones,

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historical markers placed there by some of
the first kings of Denmark

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more than a thousand years ago.

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Once they were painted bright colours,

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but a millennium of erosion has taken its
toll.

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That's also why they're now in a climate-controlled
glass box

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to keep them safe from the weather and from
vandals.

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The smaller, older stone was placed by King
Gorm

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in honour of his wife, Thyra, but the larger
one:

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that was placed by their son, whose name,

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once you translate it to English, was Harald
Bluetooth.

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The inscription honours his parents, and then
it says:

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"Harald, who won for himself all of Denmark
and Norway and made the Danes Christian".

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There's an inscription of Jesus on the back.

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Now, obviously, history is messy and complicated,

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and if you are raising a memorial runestone
to yourself and to your own achievements,

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then you gloss over some of the less successful
bits of your history, but still:

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this is an incredibly important artifact.

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It's called Denmark's birth certificate,

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it's part of this World Heritage Site,

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and it tells the tale of a king who united
Denmark and Norway.

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A thousand years later, an engineer at Intel
called Jim Kardach

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was working on short-range radio technology,

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the sort of thing that might unite computers
and cell phones,

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and make all those devices speak one compatible
protocol.

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The various names proposed for the various
technologies

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were things like Biz-RF, MC-Link and Low Power
RF,

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which were all a bit unwieldy.

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Kardack heard the story of Harald Bluetooth

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from a Swedish person that he was working
alongside,

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and he figured, huh, that'd make a good codename
for the technology.

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And that's all it was.

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A codename.

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The official name that was decided later was
Personal Area Networking, or PAN,

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a name that stuck until three weeks before
launch

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when the lawyers said that they couldn't possibly
trademark something so generic.

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With no other options, they went with Bluetooth.

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And that logo?

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Harald Bluetooth.

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HB in the runes of the time, more or less.

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Combine those two characters into what's called
a "bind rune",

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sort of kind of like a signature...

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and there's the Bluetooth logo.

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A thousand years ago, a Danish king stood
somewhere near here

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and ordered those stones to be carved and
raised.

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And now, his name is on our phones.