Impeccable Aesthetics of Bluetooth

The man himself
    While it doesn't always work perfectly I still appreciate that Bluetooth is this standardized thing that works on all devices. It also has a weird name and a rune for a logo, so you wonder how that came to be. Well, it's named after an ancient Danish king, Harald Bluetooth. King Harald Bluetooth is known in history for uniting the separated tribes in Denmark into one big kingdom. The idea was that when they were developing this wireless technology, they were uniting these separate communication protocols into one. So they wanted to name it Bluetooth. Not at first, though. Bluetooth was an unofficial nickname, they were gonna name it something completely lame like RadioWire or Personal Area Networking. But they couldn't clear the trademarks for those, and I'm glad because it is so much cooler to have a function named after an ancient viking king. That's also where the logo comes from. The bluetooth logo is a combination of the ancient runes for H and B - Harald Bluetooth.

    Can you imagine being Harald Bluetooth, and learning about Bluetooth? Being remembered a thousand years after your own time, but mostly unknown for your own accomplishments, famous for being the namesake of a technology that you couldn't even comprehend. Or maybe I'm underestimating Harald here. Maybe he could comprehend wireless communication protocols easily, maybe easier than I can.

    Also Harald's dad was a man named Gorm the Old. I thought I'd mention because that's also a baller name. "I'm the old Gorm, I want gormal beer." And he's the subject of this really cool painting:

    Ethernet also has an awesome name. As in the cables. So, the history of observing celestial bodies goes back millennia. But observing space is closer. People like Galileo and Hooke were obviously smart and could figure out a great deal from the knowledge they had, but what was (or wasn't) in space was unknown. So, it was thought that there was some substance in space, that they called "aether," that possibly let the planets move as fast as they do when they're submerged. Like some sort of oil that they could glide through. And like how oil raises above water, aether rose above air, filling the heavens. People believed that light was a wave that had to travel through something, and it was traveling through aether when it travelled in space. And like light waves through aether, information would travel through the ether network.

And then you have WiFi, which is just wireless + high fidelity.



images:

Harald Bluetooth

Bluetooth logo

Gorm the Old

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