I'm in the small village of Jelling, in Denmark.
And behind me, in that central churchyard,
are the Jelling Stones.
They're runestones,
historical markers placed there by some of the first kings of Denmark
more than a thousand years ago.
Once they were painted bright colours,
but a millennium of erosion has taken its toll.
That's also why they're now in a climate-controlled glass box
to keep them safe from the weather and from vandals.
The smaller, older stone was placed by King Gorm
in honour of his wife, Thyra, but the larger one:
that was placed by their son, whose name,
once you translate it to English, was Harald Bluetooth.
The inscription honours his parents, and then it says:
"Harald, who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian".
There's an inscription of Jesus on the back.
Now, obviously, history is messy and complicated,
and if you are raising a memorial runestone to yourself and to your own achievements,
then you gloss over some of the less successful bits of your history, but still:
this is an incredibly important artifact.
It's called Denmark's birth certificate,
it's part of this World Heritage Site,
and it tells the tale of a king who united Denmark and Norway.
A thousand years later, an engineer at Intel called Jim Kardach
was working on short-range radio technology,
the sort of thing that might unite computers and cell phones,
and make all those devices speak one compatible protocol.
The various names proposed for the various technologies
were things like Biz-RF, MC-Link and Low Power RF,
which were all a bit unwieldy.
Kardack heard the story of Harald Bluetooth
from a Swedish person that he was working alongside,
and he figured, huh, that'd make a good codename for the technology.
And that's all it was.
A codename.
The official name that was decided later was Personal Area Networking, or PAN,
a name that stuck until three weeks before launch
when the lawyers said that they couldn't possibly trademark something so generic.
With no other options, they went with Bluetooth.
And that logo?
Harald Bluetooth.
HB in the runes of the time, more or less.
Combine those two characters into what's called a "bind rune",
sort of kind of like a signature...
and there's the Bluetooth logo.
A thousand years ago, a Danish king stood somewhere near here
and ordered those stones to be carved and raised.
And now, his name is on our phones.