A friend of mine said she didn’t know what Bluetooth is. This is a brief explanation. Bluetooth has aspects that might interest liberal-artsy people.

Bluetooth is a method for transmitting data over short distances, so you don’t need cables. It is transmitted over a frequency that changes rapidly within a narrow band so it doesn’t interfere with other devices using the same method. This method is called frequency hopping.

One method to implement frequency hopping was patented in 1942 by Hedy Lamarr (the actress) and George Antheil (the composer), who wanted to use it to send radio guidance to torpedoes that could not be interfered with. The idea was to use a piano roll to change the frequency rapidly. As you might expect, their method used 88 different frequencies. They never benefited from their patent because clocks in those days weren’t accurate enough.

Hedy Lamarr lived in prewar Germany and was mathematically talented. She married an arms manufacturer who took her to meetings where she learned about military technology. She was disgusted with his fascist tendencies (they were both Jewish) and one day in 1937 arranged to go to a party wearing all her expensive jewelry. She and her maid drugged the husband and she escaped to England with the jewelry. She met Louis B. Mayer and wound up starring in a number of films.

George Antheil grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and acquired the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music as a patron. His most famous work is Ballet Mécanique, which featured (among other things) several player pianos and three airplane propellers with leather strips flapping in them. At an early concert they blew off toupees and hats from members of the audience. Later concerts had them pointing at the ceiling. I heard a recording of it many years ago and was fascinated by it. In spite of what the description suggests, it is real music.

Bluetooth is named after Haraldr Blátönn, who was King of Denmark in the tenth century. Runestones he erected still exist, in Jelling in Denmark. They have been standing outside for a thousand years but soon they will be moved indoors. If your computer or music player has Bluetooth, you will see its logo on the instrument. The logo is a “bind-rune” composed of the runes for H and B.

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