July 17, 2024 • 19 mins
King Harald of Denmark had a little quirk that would, centuries later, provide inspiration for the naming of a modern technology. We learn how his lack of oral hygiene led to the naming of a wireless protocol.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
tech are you? All right? I got a story for y'all.
In the mid tenth century, Harold, son of Gorm the Old,
(00:28):
took up the mission that his father had followed his
entire life, which was to unite his home country of
Denmark and then after that further conquer the neighboring regions.
He converted to Christianity, and then he made the rest
of the Danes do it too, And he actually went
so far as to give his father's tomb a Christian
(00:50):
glow up. Because daddy was a pagan and Mama was
a go go girl. His own son would eventually rise
up against him. But what does all this have to
do with tech, Well, it kind of has a little
bit to do with oral hygiene. See, back in the
dark age, is not everybody was fastidious about brushing their
(01:12):
teeth after every meal, and don't get me started un flossing,
either dental floss or the outdated meme dance. And Old
Harry got himself a gammy tooth, So it was a
dead tooth, you see, and it sort of had this grayish,
bluish hue. This gave rise to folks referring to him
as Bluetooth. And this is where the word bluetooth comes from.
(01:35):
The word we use to name a wireless communications technology
comes from a medieval Danish king with a gross dead tooth.
This is not a joke, this is real. So why
why is Bluetooth named after this? Well, it helps when
you know that the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson developed the
(01:57):
Bluetooth standard. So Sweden has its own history of kings obviously,
and Sweden is nestled between Denmark and Norway, to countries
that old Harry stank Tooth ruled over, but Sweden was
more of a region of different provinces around this time.
It actually coalesced into a kingdom around nine seventy Common era,
(02:18):
which was late into Harry Stinkytooth's rain. So maybe none
of the Swedish kings had suitable nicknames that would work
as well for a technology. But the engineer leading the
development of Bluetooth was doctor Yop Hartsen, whose name I
know I have butchered and I apologize, but he was
(02:39):
born in the Netherlands. That's actually of no help whatsoever.
The Netherlands is on the other side of Germany from Denmark.
Plus the Netherlands didn't become a country of its own
until fifteen seventy nine, ages after Bluetooth was doing all
of his unifying and converting over in Denmark and Norway.
So the name actually came not from a Dane or
a Swede or a Dutch person. Instead, it came from
(03:02):
an American, specifically an electrical engineer named Jim Kardak, who
was working as part of a consortium on this technology. Now,
the story goes that Jim had been reading a great
deal about the Vikings and that he had come across
the story of King Harold Gormson and his Blue Tooth,
(03:23):
and he thought that Harold, who worked to unite Norway
and Denmark, was doing something similar to what this consortium
was trying to do, but on a tech level, which
was to unite PC and cellular devices through a short
range wireless communications protocol. Now, the story goes that Bluetooth
was just a code name. It was not supposed to
(03:45):
be the permanent name of the technology. But here we are,
and we'll talk more about that in a second, but
we got the fun name story out of the way.
It's kind of like the too long, didn't read version
of this episode. But let's talk talk about the technology itself. Well,
take another step back and we'll talk about what prompted
(04:05):
this idea in the first place, and what role bluetooth
plays in technology today and how it has evolved over
the last several years. So back in around nineteen ninety four,
doctor Hartson over at Ericson was working on developing technologies
and standards for short range radio communications, and the idea
was just to cut chords out of the equation, specifically
(04:28):
the RS two thirty two wired standard. You had all
these chords and cables that you needed when you had
a computer connecting to all these different devices. That's kind
of a hassle. Wouldn't it be nice if you could
eliminate all that tangled mess and have a wireless means
of having devices connect and synchronize with one another. That
(04:49):
would be great. I remember my very first MP three player.
That one actually required a wired connection to my PC
if I wanted to add more music to the device.
The same thing was true for personal Digital Assistance or PDAs.
You would create your schedule and your contacts list and
all that kind of stuff on your work computer. Then
you would connect your PDA to that work computer via
(05:12):
a cable and transfer the data over so that you
could have access to that information while you were on
the go. One potential alternative to wires was using infrared
transmitters and receivers, similar to how most TV remotes work,
although we've got Wi Fi TV remotes and Bluetooth ones too,
but you know, back in the day, it was all infrared,
(05:34):
and in fact, there are devices that used these kinds
of methods to transmit data between them. You would connect
a transmitter slash receiver a transceiver if you will, to
your computer and you would use, you know, whatever device
you had that also was outfitted with a transceiver to
transfer data back and forth. But this meant you needed
to have line of sight with the transceiver connected to
(05:56):
the PC in order to do this. So if you've
ever used an infrared based remote control, you know that
if you get too out of line with a television
or a cable bucks or whatever it is you're connected to,
the remote doesn't work anymore. Same thing if you're doing
that in the middle of the data transfer, you're not
gonna get a successful transfer of information. There was a
problem to be solved here how to manage data transfers
(06:20):
over short distances without the use of wires or line
of sight. You didn't need the communications to go very far,
which would in theory mean you could find solutions that
didn't require a great deal of power to operate. That
was important too. Now, batteries have a limited amount of
power storage, after all, and small batteries in particular have
(06:40):
very limited power storage. So if you want something that's
going to fit into like a mobile device form factor,
it can't require a lot of power or it's not
going to be useful. Rapid charging was not really a
thing yet, and you didn't want to drain all your
devices every time. You just needed to share data between them.
And so doctor Hartson got to work stone and experimenting
(07:01):
with short range wireless transmissions. His work led to him
experimenting in the two point four gigahertz band of radio
wave frequencies. So, just as a quick reminder, we typically
measure radio waves in wavelength and in frequency, and these
have an inverse relationship in that the smaller the wavelength,
the higher the frequency. A two point four gigahertz frequency
(07:25):
means that two point four billion wavelengths will pass a
given point of space in a second. A two point
four gigahertz signal is less capable than longer wavelength signals
to penetrate hard reflective surfaces like concrete or metal, so
they tend to bounce off of these surfaces. But doctor
Hartson was concerned with short range communications, so that wasn't
(07:47):
a deal breaker, right, Like if the Bluetooth signals or
what would become Bluetooth signals can't go through walls, not
that big a deal. It wasn't intended to be a
long range communications solution. He also wanted his solution to
be very power efficient, so it wasn't like the transmitters
were going to be blasting this out at high amplitudes.
(08:08):
One issue that he faced was that some Wi Fi
protocols were already making use of signals in the two
point four a gighertz band of frequencies, which meant any
other protocol would need to account for potential interference with
those signals, Like if you're all just broadcasting on the
same signal, things are going to get messy. They'll just
interfere with one another. So doctor Hartson implemented frequency hopping
(08:31):
practices so that Bluetooth devices could operate in the same
environment as Wi Fi without the signals actually getting crossed.
And I should also mention the name Bluetooth still was
not in use yet, that had not become a thing.
So while doctor Hartson was working on these protocols that
would become part of Bluetooth efforts, a few companies were
forming this consortium to create a technology that had the
(08:53):
same goals as what Hertson had over at Ericson, and
these companies created what was called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group,
or eventually it was called that it was a special
interest group that didn't have a name for the technology.
Initially this began with a collaboration between Ericsson and Nokia
and Intel. Around nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety eight
(09:15):
is when this started to get moving. This was when
Jim Kardak first proposed the code name Bluetooth for the technology.
The Special Interest Group or SIG SIG would grow significantly,
so today SIG boasts a community made up of more
than forty thousand companies, Okay, the stage is set. We're
(09:36):
going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors,
and we'll be back to talk more about the origins
of Bluetooth. We're back. So SIG, this special interest group
surrounding this shortwave radio communications protocol, focuses on the task
(10:01):
at hand. They build on Hartson's work, and they get
closer to a point where they could launch a standard,
but they remained stuck on the problem of what they're
going to name it. So originally the thought was they
were going to call it Personal Area Networking in alignment
with Local Area Networking or LAN and Wide Area Networking
(10:21):
or WAN, but the acronym would be PAN for Personal
Area Networking, and has it turned out a whole lot
of folks were using PAN in other ways already lots
of other trademarks related to PAN out there, so establishing
brand identity would be really challenging and probably litigious. So
an alternative proposal was to call it radio wire, but
(10:44):
the deadline to launch was rapidly approaching, and the team
had not had the time to actually do a deep
dive on a trademark search to make sure that radio
wire wasn't going to conflict with any other existing trademarks,
so really having no other port in the storm. As
they were getting close to launch, they didn't have any
other option but to stick with the code name Bluetooth.
(11:07):
Harold's gross dental problem would become the official name for
this technology. Interestingly, it would also provide inspiration for the logo.
If you look at the logo of Bluetooth, it's actually
the merger of two different runs. So one of those runes,
if you were to look at it, kind of looks
like an asterisk if you had stretched it a little vertically,
and the other looks like an uppercase B. But the
(11:29):
bee has sharp bits instead of curves, and they actually
represent the initials of Hadrald Bluetooth. So it's a Viking
H and a B combined with one another to make
the logo, which I think is pretty cute. SIG released
the first Bluetooth standard, also known as Bluetooth one point zero,
in nineteen ninety nine. The standard at that time could
(11:49):
support a theoretical transmission throughput of around seven hundred and
twenty one kilobits per second, and it had a broadcast
range of just ten meters or right under thirty three
feet or so these limitations meant that Bluetooth one point
zero was not suitable for stuff like streaming audio. You
could send small packets of data between devices, but it
just really wasn't up to snuff for things like persistent
(12:10):
streaming connections between like a phone and some wireless earbuds. Also,
when I say seven hundred and twenty one kilobits per second,
that was just the theoretical throughput. In real world situations
you would typically get much smaller or lower throughputs. And
that's the case with any data transfer technology. You'll often
hear one figure advertised and then in practice you'll find
(12:34):
that you get something very different. And it's just because ideally,
if everything works exactly as it can at the best
of its ability, you'll get that theoretical top end. It's
just the real world rarely is ideal. Now, the first
device is to actually feature Bluetooth chips, and them came
out around two thousand. The very first phone to include it,
(12:55):
at least as as far as manufacturing is concerned, was
the Sony Ericson T thirty six mobile phone. Makes sense,
Ericson was behind this effort from the very beginning, but
that was not the first phone to actually hit store shelves.
That one would be the T thirty nine, and it
came out in early two thousand and one. The aim
of Bluetooth one point zero was just to serve as
(13:17):
a wireless alternative to that RS two thirty two standard.
Lots of computer devices relied on that standard, from printers
to computer mice, to external hard drives to modems, and
again that adds up to a whole bunch of cables.
So Bluetooth one point zero provided a chance to free
users from the tangled web. The technology wasn't an overnight
(13:38):
smash success though. For one thing, it was competing against
Wi Fi protocols. Wi Fi, however, was much more expensive. Bluetooth,
being a cheaper alternative could help manufacturers keep the cost
of production lower on their devices. The other big reason
it took a while for Bluetooth to really take off
is that it's rare that someone actually updates all of
(13:59):
their equipment and devices at the same time, and it
doesn't do you much good if only one half of
the devices you need to pair together supports Bluetooth, so
adoption took a little time. With the introduction of Bluetooth
one point one in two thousand and one, you could
hold a voice call over Bluetooth, but the fidelity requirement
for a voice call is lower than what you would
(14:20):
want for music, at least for most folks anyway, so
you still weren't really using Bluetooth to listen to music
off a device. The features introduced in this update included
Bluetooth Headset Profile and the hands Free Profile. In two
thousand and three, Bluetooth one point two would introduce the
Advanced Audio Distribution Profile aka A two DP, which sounds
(14:43):
like it's a Star Wars droid. This was the upgrade
that would allow for actual streaming music and other high
end audio to wireless speakers and headsets. So really it
was with one point two, which again launched in two
thousand and three, where we started to really kind of
see the true potential for Bluetooth as far as consumer
devices go. SIG continued to evolve the standard. They improved
(15:06):
it in two thousand and four with the release of
Bluetooth two point zero. The big advance here was improved
range of operation and data bandwidth. This version included support
for remote control devices for audio and visual technologies. An
update in two thousand and seven called Bluetooth two point
one included a much needed security update. So originally Bluetooth
would broadcast out a device's address just willy nilly, it
(15:29):
just it had to. That was part of the the standard,
and one early concern around Bluetooth implementations was that it
could be possible for an unauthorized individual to connect to
a Bluetooth transceiver that was in pairing mode, and that's
clearly not a great thing if you want really good
security and privacy. In two thousand and nine we got
Bluetooth three point zero. This allowed for high speed data
(15:51):
transfers between devices connected via Bluetooth, and by high speed,
I mean like twenty three megabits per second, which still
is not it's not super fast compared to Wi Fi,
but it was a huge step over earlier versions of Bluetooth.
And besides, Bluetooth's purpose was to fill a specific niche
in wireless communications. It wasn't to replace Wi Fi, it
was to augment what WiFi is already doing. In twenty thirteen,
(16:14):
we got a split with Bluetooth, so one branch of
the fork went with the longer range, higher bandwidth version
of Bluetooth that we've been talking about so this version
requires a little bit more power than the other branch
of the fork. This would become low energy or l
E Bluetooth. This alternative version was ideal for wearables devices
(16:35):
that had much smaller batteries. The LE Bluetooth protocol is
more energy efficient and thus doesn't put too much of
a strain on devices that have these small batteries. Both
branches would get an update in twenty seventeen with the
release of Bluetooth five, which added in more improvements both
in data transfer bandwidth and in range. Bluetooth, particularly l
(16:55):
E Bluetooth, is also used in a lot of Internet
of Things implementations. IoT devices communicate in small data transfers
and require frequent or persistent connections, so an energy efficient
protocol designed for small data transfers is ideal. Recently, in
twenty twenty two, SIG released new LEE Audio specifications allowing
(17:15):
for low energy Bluetooth implementations with quality improvements for audio,
and in twenty twenty three, Bluetooth five point four introduced
synchronized communication between devices in a particular area using periodic
broadcast control. Now this is ideal for IoT implementations. You
might have like a central control hub and hundreds or
(17:37):
even potentially thousands of low powered IoT sensors all forming
part of the network, and they might use this particular
version of Bluetooth to transfer information between them because it
has that very power efficient design to it, and throughout
the evolution, engineers made sure to keep Bluetooth backwards compatible,
so if one device supports Bluetooth five but the other
(17:59):
one is limited to Bluetooth three, these two devices can
still talk to each other, which is a gosh darn
good decision to make. So that's the skinny on Bluetooth,
a very high level look at it, and I really
think it's interesting to note that this thing was never
meant to be called Bluetooth permanently. That was just kind
(18:20):
of a code name, a funny little quirky thing to choose,
inspired by a medieval Danish king with a nasty tooth,
and that ends up becoming a formative wireless technology that
we use today. I love stories like that. I hope
you are all well, and I'll talk to you again
(18:43):
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
tech are you? All right? I got a story for y'all.
In the mid tenth century, Harold, son of Gorm the Old,
(00:28):
took up the mission that his father had followed his
entire life, which was to unite his home country of
Denmark and then after that further conquer the neighboring regions.
He converted to Christianity, and then he made the rest
of the Danes do it too, And he actually went
so far as to give his father's tomb a Christian
(00:50):
glow up. Because daddy was a pagan and Mama was
a go go girl. His own son would eventually rise
up against him. But what does all this have to
do with tech, Well, it kind of has a little
bit to do with oral hygiene. See, back in the
dark age, is not everybody was fastidious about brushing their
(01:12):
teeth after every meal, and don't get me started un flossing,
either dental floss or the outdated meme dance. And Old
Harry got himself a gammy tooth, So it was a
dead tooth, you see, and it sort of had this grayish,
bluish hue. This gave rise to folks referring to him
as Bluetooth. And this is where the word bluetooth comes from.
(01:35):
The word we use to name a wireless communications technology
comes from a medieval Danish king with a gross dead tooth.
This is not a joke, this is real. So why
why is Bluetooth named after this? Well, it helps when
you know that the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson developed the
(01:57):
Bluetooth standard. So Sweden has its own history of kings obviously,
and Sweden is nestled between Denmark and Norway, to countries
that old Harry stank Tooth ruled over, but Sweden was
more of a region of different provinces around this time.
It actually coalesced into a kingdom around nine seventy Common era,
(02:18):
which was late into Harry Stinkytooth's rain. So maybe none
of the Swedish kings had suitable nicknames that would work
as well for a technology. But the engineer leading the
development of Bluetooth was doctor Yop Hartsen, whose name I
know I have butchered and I apologize, but he was
(02:39):
born in the Netherlands. That's actually of no help whatsoever.
The Netherlands is on the other side of Germany from Denmark.
Plus the Netherlands didn't become a country of its own
until fifteen seventy nine, ages after Bluetooth was doing all
of his unifying and converting over in Denmark and Norway.
So the name actually came not from a Dane or
a Swede or a Dutch person. Instead, it came from
(03:02):
an American, specifically an electrical engineer named Jim Kardak, who
was working as part of a consortium on this technology. Now,
the story goes that Jim had been reading a great
deal about the Vikings and that he had come across
the story of King Harold Gormson and his Blue Tooth,
(03:23):
and he thought that Harold, who worked to unite Norway
and Denmark, was doing something similar to what this consortium
was trying to do, but on a tech level, which
was to unite PC and cellular devices through a short
range wireless communications protocol. Now, the story goes that Bluetooth
was just a code name. It was not supposed to
(03:45):
be the permanent name of the technology. But here we are,
and we'll talk more about that in a second, but
we got the fun name story out of the way.
It's kind of like the too long, didn't read version
of this episode. But let's talk talk about the technology itself. Well,
take another step back and we'll talk about what prompted
(04:05):
this idea in the first place, and what role bluetooth
plays in technology today and how it has evolved over
the last several years. So back in around nineteen ninety four,
doctor Hartson over at Ericson was working on developing technologies
and standards for short range radio communications, and the idea
was just to cut chords out of the equation, specifically
(04:28):
the RS two thirty two wired standard. You had all
these chords and cables that you needed when you had
a computer connecting to all these different devices. That's kind
of a hassle. Wouldn't it be nice if you could
eliminate all that tangled mess and have a wireless means
of having devices connect and synchronize with one another. That
(04:49):
would be great. I remember my very first MP three player.
That one actually required a wired connection to my PC
if I wanted to add more music to the device.
The same thing was true for personal Digital Assistance or PDAs.
You would create your schedule and your contacts list and
all that kind of stuff on your work computer. Then
you would connect your PDA to that work computer via
(05:12):
a cable and transfer the data over so that you
could have access to that information while you were on
the go. One potential alternative to wires was using infrared
transmitters and receivers, similar to how most TV remotes work,
although we've got Wi Fi TV remotes and Bluetooth ones too,
but you know, back in the day, it was all infrared,
(05:34):
and in fact, there are devices that used these kinds
of methods to transmit data between them. You would connect
a transmitter slash receiver a transceiver if you will, to
your computer and you would use, you know, whatever device
you had that also was outfitted with a transceiver to
transfer data back and forth. But this meant you needed
to have line of sight with the transceiver connected to
(05:56):
the PC in order to do this. So if you've
ever used an infrared based remote control, you know that
if you get too out of line with a television
or a cable bucks or whatever it is you're connected to,
the remote doesn't work anymore. Same thing if you're doing
that in the middle of the data transfer, you're not
gonna get a successful transfer of information. There was a
problem to be solved here how to manage data transfers
(06:20):
over short distances without the use of wires or line
of sight. You didn't need the communications to go very far,
which would in theory mean you could find solutions that
didn't require a great deal of power to operate. That
was important too. Now, batteries have a limited amount of
power storage, after all, and small batteries in particular have
(06:40):
very limited power storage. So if you want something that's
going to fit into like a mobile device form factor,
it can't require a lot of power or it's not
going to be useful. Rapid charging was not really a
thing yet, and you didn't want to drain all your
devices every time. You just needed to share data between them.
And so doctor Hartson got to work stone and experimenting
(07:01):
with short range wireless transmissions. His work led to him
experimenting in the two point four gigahertz band of radio
wave frequencies. So, just as a quick reminder, we typically
measure radio waves in wavelength and in frequency, and these
have an inverse relationship in that the smaller the wavelength,
the higher the frequency. A two point four gigahertz frequency
(07:25):
means that two point four billion wavelengths will pass a
given point of space in a second. A two point
four gigahertz signal is less capable than longer wavelength signals
to penetrate hard reflective surfaces like concrete or metal, so
they tend to bounce off of these surfaces. But doctor
Hartson was concerned with short range communications, so that wasn't
(07:47):
a deal breaker, right, Like if the Bluetooth signals or
what would become Bluetooth signals can't go through walls, not
that big a deal. It wasn't intended to be a
long range communications solution. He also wanted his solution to
be very power efficient, so it wasn't like the transmitters
were going to be blasting this out at high amplitudes.
(08:08):
One issue that he faced was that some Wi Fi
protocols were already making use of signals in the two
point four a gighertz band of frequencies, which meant any
other protocol would need to account for potential interference with
those signals, Like if you're all just broadcasting on the
same signal, things are going to get messy. They'll just
interfere with one another. So doctor Hartson implemented frequency hopping
(08:31):
practices so that Bluetooth devices could operate in the same
environment as Wi Fi without the signals actually getting crossed.
And I should also mention the name Bluetooth still was
not in use yet, that had not become a thing.
So while doctor Hartson was working on these protocols that
would become part of Bluetooth efforts, a few companies were
forming this consortium to create a technology that had the
(08:53):
same goals as what Hertson had over at Ericson, and
these companies created what was called the Bluetooth Special Interest Group,
or eventually it was called that it was a special
interest group that didn't have a name for the technology.
Initially this began with a collaboration between Ericsson and Nokia
and Intel. Around nineteen ninety six to nineteen ninety eight
(09:15):
is when this started to get moving. This was when
Jim Kardak first proposed the code name Bluetooth for the technology.
The Special Interest Group or SIG SIG would grow significantly,
so today SIG boasts a community made up of more
than forty thousand companies, Okay, the stage is set. We're
(09:36):
going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors,
and we'll be back to talk more about the origins
of Bluetooth. We're back. So SIG, this special interest group
surrounding this shortwave radio communications protocol, focuses on the task
(10:01):
at hand. They build on Hartson's work, and they get
closer to a point where they could launch a standard,
but they remained stuck on the problem of what they're
going to name it. So originally the thought was they
were going to call it Personal Area Networking in alignment
with Local Area Networking or LAN and Wide Area Networking
(10:21):
or WAN, but the acronym would be PAN for Personal
Area Networking, and has it turned out a whole lot
of folks were using PAN in other ways already lots
of other trademarks related to PAN out there, so establishing
brand identity would be really challenging and probably litigious. So
an alternative proposal was to call it radio wire, but
(10:44):
the deadline to launch was rapidly approaching, and the team
had not had the time to actually do a deep
dive on a trademark search to make sure that radio
wire wasn't going to conflict with any other existing trademarks,
so really having no other port in the storm. As
they were getting close to launch, they didn't have any
other option but to stick with the code name Bluetooth.
(11:07):
Harold's gross dental problem would become the official name for
this technology. Interestingly, it would also provide inspiration for the logo.
If you look at the logo of Bluetooth, it's actually
the merger of two different runs. So one of those runes,
if you were to look at it, kind of looks
like an asterisk if you had stretched it a little vertically,
and the other looks like an uppercase B. But the
(11:29):
bee has sharp bits instead of curves, and they actually
represent the initials of Hadrald Bluetooth. So it's a Viking
H and a B combined with one another to make
the logo, which I think is pretty cute. SIG released
the first Bluetooth standard, also known as Bluetooth one point zero,
in nineteen ninety nine. The standard at that time could
(11:49):
support a theoretical transmission throughput of around seven hundred and
twenty one kilobits per second, and it had a broadcast
range of just ten meters or right under thirty three
feet or so these limitations meant that Bluetooth one point
zero was not suitable for stuff like streaming audio. You
could send small packets of data between devices, but it
just really wasn't up to snuff for things like persistent
(12:10):
streaming connections between like a phone and some wireless earbuds. Also,
when I say seven hundred and twenty one kilobits per second,
that was just the theoretical throughput. In real world situations
you would typically get much smaller or lower throughputs. And
that's the case with any data transfer technology. You'll often
hear one figure advertised and then in practice you'll find
(12:34):
that you get something very different. And it's just because ideally,
if everything works exactly as it can at the best
of its ability, you'll get that theoretical top end. It's
just the real world rarely is ideal. Now, the first
device is to actually feature Bluetooth chips, and them came
out around two thousand. The very first phone to include it,
(12:55):
at least as as far as manufacturing is concerned, was
the Sony Ericson T thirty six mobile phone. Makes sense,
Ericson was behind this effort from the very beginning, but
that was not the first phone to actually hit store shelves.
That one would be the T thirty nine, and it
came out in early two thousand and one. The aim
of Bluetooth one point zero was just to serve as
(13:17):
a wireless alternative to that RS two thirty two standard.
Lots of computer devices relied on that standard, from printers
to computer mice, to external hard drives to modems, and
again that adds up to a whole bunch of cables.
So Bluetooth one point zero provided a chance to free
users from the tangled web. The technology wasn't an overnight
(13:38):
smash success though. For one thing, it was competing against
Wi Fi protocols. Wi Fi, however, was much more expensive. Bluetooth,
being a cheaper alternative could help manufacturers keep the cost
of production lower on their devices. The other big reason
it took a while for Bluetooth to really take off
is that it's rare that someone actually updates all of
(13:59):
their equipment and devices at the same time, and it
doesn't do you much good if only one half of
the devices you need to pair together supports Bluetooth, so
adoption took a little time. With the introduction of Bluetooth
one point one in two thousand and one, you could
hold a voice call over Bluetooth, but the fidelity requirement
for a voice call is lower than what you would
(14:20):
want for music, at least for most folks anyway, so
you still weren't really using Bluetooth to listen to music
off a device. The features introduced in this update included
Bluetooth Headset Profile and the hands Free Profile. In two
thousand and three, Bluetooth one point two would introduce the
Advanced Audio Distribution Profile aka A two DP, which sounds
(14:43):
like it's a Star Wars droid. This was the upgrade
that would allow for actual streaming music and other high
end audio to wireless speakers and headsets. So really it
was with one point two, which again launched in two
thousand and three, where we started to really kind of
see the true potential for Bluetooth as far as consumer
devices go. SIG continued to evolve the standard. They improved
(15:06):
it in two thousand and four with the release of
Bluetooth two point zero. The big advance here was improved
range of operation and data bandwidth. This version included support
for remote control devices for audio and visual technologies. An
update in two thousand and seven called Bluetooth two point
one included a much needed security update. So originally Bluetooth
would broadcast out a device's address just willy nilly, it
(15:29):
just it had to. That was part of the the standard,
and one early concern around Bluetooth implementations was that it
could be possible for an unauthorized individual to connect to
a Bluetooth transceiver that was in pairing mode, and that's
clearly not a great thing if you want really good
security and privacy. In two thousand and nine we got
Bluetooth three point zero. This allowed for high speed data
(15:51):
transfers between devices connected via Bluetooth, and by high speed,
I mean like twenty three megabits per second, which still
is not it's not super fast compared to Wi Fi,
but it was a huge step over earlier versions of Bluetooth.
And besides, Bluetooth's purpose was to fill a specific niche
in wireless communications. It wasn't to replace Wi Fi, it
was to augment what WiFi is already doing. In twenty thirteen,
(16:14):
we got a split with Bluetooth, so one branch of
the fork went with the longer range, higher bandwidth version
of Bluetooth that we've been talking about so this version
requires a little bit more power than the other branch
of the fork. This would become low energy or l
E Bluetooth. This alternative version was ideal for wearables devices
(16:35):
that had much smaller batteries. The LE Bluetooth protocol is
more energy efficient and thus doesn't put too much of
a strain on devices that have these small batteries. Both
branches would get an update in twenty seventeen with the
release of Bluetooth five, which added in more improvements both
in data transfer bandwidth and in range. Bluetooth, particularly l
(16:55):
E Bluetooth, is also used in a lot of Internet
of Things implementations. IoT devices communicate in small data transfers
and require frequent or persistent connections, so an energy efficient
protocol designed for small data transfers is ideal. Recently, in
twenty twenty two, SIG released new LEE Audio specifications allowing
(17:15):
for low energy Bluetooth implementations with quality improvements for audio,
and in twenty twenty three, Bluetooth five point four introduced
synchronized communication between devices in a particular area using periodic
broadcast control. Now this is ideal for IoT implementations. You
might have like a central control hub and hundreds or
(17:37):
even potentially thousands of low powered IoT sensors all forming
part of the network, and they might use this particular
version of Bluetooth to transfer information between them because it
has that very power efficient design to it, and throughout
the evolution, engineers made sure to keep Bluetooth backwards compatible,
so if one device supports Bluetooth five but the other
(17:59):
one is limited to Bluetooth three, these two devices can
still talk to each other, which is a gosh darn
good decision to make. So that's the skinny on Bluetooth,
a very high level look at it, and I really
think it's interesting to note that this thing was never
meant to be called Bluetooth permanently. That was just kind
(18:20):
of a code name, a funny little quirky thing to choose,
inspired by a medieval Danish king with a nasty tooth,
and that ends up becoming a formative wireless technology that
we use today. I love stories like that. I hope
you are all well, and I'll talk to you again
(18:43):
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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