Bluetooth 1.0 — Ericsson's Short-Range Radio, Named After a Viking King

When was Bluetooth invented? The technology came out of Ericsson in Lund, Sweden. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Ericsson engineer Jaap Haartsen began formulating the system that would become Bluetooth in 1994. In May 1998 Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba announced it publicly as the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, and the first version of the specification, Bluetooth 1.0, was released on 26 July 1999. The name comes from Harald "Bluetooth", the tenth-century king who united Denmark and Norway.

Timeline

A short-range radio from Ericsson

The National Inventors Hall of Fame says Haartsen, who earned his doctorate at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, joined Ericsson in the US in 1991 and moved to its mobile phone division in Lund in 1993 to work on indoor wireless systems. His task was to find a short-range radio connection that would add functions to mobile phones and create new sales. In 1994 he began formulating a system for connecting all kinds of electronic devices. At first, it was meant simply as a more convenient alternative to wired voice calls.

Wikipedia starts the story earlier. In its account, Nils Rydbeck, CTO of Ericsson Mobile, launched the work in 1989 with the aim of making wireless headsets; he assigned Tord Wingren to specify it and Haartsen and Sven Mattisson to develop it, and principal design and development began in 1994.

Named after a king

According to the Bluetooth SIG, the name goes back more than a millennium to King Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, known for two things: uniting Denmark and Norway in 958, and a dead tooth of a dark blue-grey colour that earned him his nickname.

When Intel, Ericsson and Nokia met in 1996 to plan the standardisation of the short-range radio, Intel's Jim Kardach suggested Bluetooth as a temporary code name. Kardach was later quoted as saying: "King Harald Bluetooth…was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link." Wikipedia dates Kardach's proposal to 1997, and says he came up with it after finding a picture of Harald Bluetooth's runestone in Gwyn Jones's A History of the Vikings.

Bluetooth was only meant to be a placeholder until marketing came up with something better. The shortlisted names were RadioWire and PAN (Personal Area Networking). PAN was the favourite until a search found tens of thousands of hits for it on the internet; a full trademark search on RadioWire could not be completed in time for launch, which left Bluetooth. The name spread through the industry before it could be changed. The logo is a bind rune merging two Younger Futhark runes, ᚼ (Hagall) and ᛒ (Bjarkan), Harald's initials.

The 1998 announcement

On 20 May 1998 Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba unveiled the technology, code-named Bluetooth. It would carry voice and data over short-range radio so that users could connect a wide range of devices quickly without cables. The radio would operate in the globally available 2.45 GHz ISM band. The announcement divided the work as follows.

According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Haartsen played a key role in creating the SIG and chaired its air protocol specifications group from 1998 to 2000.

Bluetooth 1.0, 26 July 1999

On 26 July 1999 the five founding companies announced the release of the Bluetooth 1.0 specification. It consisted of two documents: the Foundation Core, with the design specifications, and the Foundation Profile, with interoperability guidelines. More than 200 engineers had contributed, the announcement said, and more than 850 companies had joined the SIG since its formation in May 1998. Products were expected in 2000. The research firm Dataquest was quoted as predicting that 79 percent of digital handsets and more than 200 million PCs would include Bluetooth by 2002.

According to Wikipedia, the basic data rate was 1 Mbit/s. The National Inventors Hall of Fame puts the range of the first generation at about 11 yards, roughly 10 metres.

What came next

According to Wikipedia, the first Bluetooth phone was the Ericsson T36, a prototype that was never released; its revised version, the T39, reached shops in June 2001, but the Ericsson R520m, released in the first quarter of 2001, was the first commercially available Bluetooth phone.

Today the Bluetooth SIG describes two radios: Bluetooth Classic, which uses 79 channels in the 2.4 GHz band and is mainly used for wireless audio, and the low-power Bluetooth LE, which uses 40 channels and supports broadcast and mesh as well as point-to-point links, and is also used to locate devices.

For the other pillar of short-range wireless see Wi-Fi; the wider story is on the mobile timeline. For an example of a phone platform that included Bluetooth as a standard feature, see Nokia's Symbian.