Who invented Bluetooth?

If you own a smartphone, tablet, laptop, speakers, or any of the array of electronic devices on the market today, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you’ve “paired” at least a couple of them together. And while virtually all of your personal devices these days are equipped with Bluetooth technology, few people actually know how it got there.

Hollywood and World War II played a pivotal role in the creation of not only Bluetooth but a multitude of wireless technologies. In 1937, Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-born actress, left her marriage to an arms dealer with ties to Nazis and fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and fled to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a star. With the support of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who promoted her to audiences as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” Lamarr notched roles in films such as “Boom Town” starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, “Ziegfeld Girl” starring Judy Garland, and the 1949 hit “Samson and Delilah.”

She also found time to do some inventing on the side. Using her drafting table, Lamarr experimented with concepts that included a reworked stoplight design and a fizzy instant drink that came in tablet form. Although none of them panned out, it was her collaboration with composer George Antheil on an innovative guidance system for torpedoes that set her on a course to change the world.

Drawing on what she learned about weapons systems while she was married, the two used paper player piano rolls to generate radio frequencies that hopped around as a way to prevent the enemy from jamming the signal. Initially, the U.S. Navy was reluctant to implement Lamarr and Antheil’s spread-spectrum radio technology, but it would later deploy the system to relay information about the position of enemy submarines to military aircraft flying overhead.

So who invented Bluetooth? The short answer is Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson. The team effort began in 1989 when the chief technology officer of Ericsson Mobile, Nils Rydbeck, together with a physician named Johan Ullman, commissioned engineers Jaap Haartsen and Sven Mattisson to come up with an optimal “short-link” radio technology standard for transmitting signals between personal computers to wireless headsets that they were planning to bring to the market. In 1990, Haartsen was nominated by the European Patent Office for the European Inventor Award.

The name “Bluetooth” is an anglicized translation of Danish King Harald Blåtand’s surname. During the 10th century, the second King of Denmark was famous in Scandinavian lore for uniting Denmark and Norway. In creating the Bluetooth standard, the inventors felt that they were, in effect, doing something similar in uniting the PC and cellular industries. Thus the name stuck. The logo is a Viking inscription, known as a bind rune, that merges the king’s two initials.

ThoughtCo