Thoughts This Week - 2025/05/09
My novel, orange juice, and Bluetooth
Starting this TTW off a bit differently than normal because I’m thrilled to share that I’ve finished editing my new fantasy-adventure/queer romance novel, In the Sea, We Breathe (tentative title).
Craving respect and a big-time promotion, intelligence officer Hsiba agrees to shadow—then secretly sabotage—the long-lost heir to the Qotosh-i Empire. There’s just one snag: he falls in love with his target. On a perilous quest, Hsiba must choose between betraying the man he loves or confronting his deepest insecurities and upending his life to save him.
I’m looking for beta readers right now to provide developmental feedback, so if you’re interested in giving my manuscript a read, please feel free to message me!
When (and Why) Did Orange Juice Become a Breakfast Beverage?
If you grew up in the United States, chances are you’ve downed a glass of O.J. for breakfast at least once in your life. For my parents, a carton of Tropicana Orange Juice was a breakfast staple, along with biscuits and bacon. I’d never considered when orange juice was introduced en masse to the American public until recently reading through Citrus: A World History by David Mabberley. Turns out, surprisingly, it was within living memory.
Nascent organized efforts to popularize orange juice consumption occurred after the Spanish Flu (1918-9), the 20th century’s COVID-19.1 While the government and private marketing campaigns pushed for daily (particularly morning) consumption foods and beverages with Vitamin C, logistics and climate limitations meant that only select parts of the U.S. could consume delicacies like orange juice. It wasn’t until World War II that O.J. began to spread. The American military employed orange-juice powder to maintain soldiers’ health and in the following post-war period, both orange juice and refrigerator sales skyrocketed. Minute Maid was the first company to capitalize on the demand, selling frozen concentrate (which you can still buy today, by the way); however, it wasn’t until the Tropicana brand’s use of pasteurized orange juice in 1954 that Americans living anywhere could buy “fresh juice” as opposed to concentrate. While California and, to a greater extent, Florida were the traditional orange-growing regions of the United States, in recent years Brazil has vastly overtaken the U.S. in production.
The Origins and Rise of Bluetooth
Bluetooth technology has become a ubiquitous part of modern life. Just looking around the room I occupy, I can list the following Bluetooth-enabled devices in my field of vision: headphones, ear buds, this computer I’m using to type, the computer’s mouse, my Google Pixel, speakers, my husband’s Fitbit, a PS5, and probably other things I’m failing to consider. Not sure about you, but realizing this surprises me. I remember a more analog time in my life where everything electronic required physical connections. When did Bluetooth spread, and how?
Well, I did some digging and can report back.
Our story begins in Sweden the mid-1990s. Engineers at Ericsson had been working on a “short-link” radio technology to allow mobile phones to connect to accessories without cables. This effort led to the formation of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (“Bluetooth SIG”) in 1998 by an international consortium of companies (Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba) to develop a new wireless standard that would replace infrared as the industry standard.
The first products to hit the market following the new standard were the Ericsson HBH-10 headset (released in 2000), which offered users the novel freedom to keep their phone in their pocket while talking via an earpiece, and the Ericsson T39 mobile phone in 2001, with built-in Bluetooth capabilities. That same year, IBM released the ThinkPad A30, the first laptop with built-in Bluetooth, enabling wireless data sync between PCs and phones.
In these early days, Bluetooth 1.0 could handle about 721 kbps of data—enough for basic data syncing and phone calls, though not much faster (or farther) than the old infrared technology it sought to replace. It most certainly could not handle audio streaming, which is probably one of the first uses you’d think of today.
Most of these early limitations have been addressed. Later Bluetooth releases upped the range (around 330 feet in ideal circumstances) and increased bandwidth speeds to 2 Mbps, which is still nowhere near the throughput of Wi-Fi or wired connections). Power consumption, once a concern for battery-operated gadgets, was dramatically reduced with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Introduced in 2010, BLE enabled years-long operation of devices like fitness trackers on a coin-cell battery. Modern Bluetooth devices also hop frequencies to avoid congested channels, and features like multipoint pairing (connecting one headset to two phones, for example) are now common.
These facts are why in just a few decades, Bluetooth has grown from an experimental idea to a global technology standard inside tens of billions of devices.
…
That’s all great, but all this reading left me wondering why the SIG decided to call this technology “Bluetooth”—where in the hell did that name come from?
Short answer: some history nerds in Scandinavia.
The engineers developing the standard chose “Bluetooth” as a code name/inside joke, inspired by a 10th-century Scandinavian king, Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson. If you’re like me and had no idea who he was, Harald is famous in Danish history for consolidating the tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom, along with converting the Danes to Christianity. Supposedly, he was called “Bluetooth” because he had a bad tooth.
The Bluetooth logo pays further homage to Harald by using a bind rune for his initials, H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ).
Upcoming…
I remain busy as heck these days. Upon finishing my novel, I’m about to travel with my husband to Japan for the next two weeks. While that could mean lights off for this newsletter, I’d rather not leave you with nothing for two weeks (and sorry for not sending anything out last Friday—I was frantically trying to wrap up the novel).
Instead of my normal content, I’ll create two special Japan-themed newsletter entries with pictures and stories from my trip! Specifics beyond that are TBD, but I hope you enjoy coming along for the ride!
では、次は日本でね！
David J. Mabberley, “Progress and Perils,” in Citrus: A World History. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2024), 211.