Pipe for dating - how nightclub visitors flirted in the last century (6 photos)

An interesting way to make “decent” acquaintances was invented in the 30s of the last century in Berlin clubs. And it was the opportunity to arrange a “decent flirtation”, which required certain investments from the club owners, that attracted new audiences there. But this is a whole communication system. So what are we talking about?





The girl is holding a telephone receiver (already flirting), and stylized pneumatic mail tubes are visible in the foreground

And we are talking about telephones and pneumatic tubes, which allowed couples to make acquaintances without attracting anyone else's attention - so to speak, observing all decency. It was enough to look at the attractive representative of the opposite sex at one of the tables and the number of this table.

Business idea

Wherever sex falls on the pyramid of human needs, most adults need it. Like just communication, desire is liked and... and for the sake of many other things, women meet men, and men meet women. Especially when basic needs - food, sleep, etc. - are satisfied. Well, or they will be satisfied with a successful acquaintance...

Perhaps this is exactly what the owners of nightclubs in Berlin thought when they came up with the idea of placing a telephone and a pneumatic mail “portal” on each table. Taking into account that the time was such that some decency and conventions still had to be observed, the solution turned out to be very popular.



Club floor plan with numbered tables

And not everyone could just decide to come up and get acquainted, we’re not talking about a brothel - we were just talking about dating, and how the curve will take you from there... In general, examining potential partners from afar, choosing who you like is convenient.

Implementation of the idea of a “dating club”

The pioneers of this “interactive dating club” were two nightclubs - Resi and Femina. Of course, both implied the presence of their own live show with artists, bars, casinos, etc. But all clubs were like that, and these were distinguished by the possibility of “remote flirting” - the audience eventually began to gather accordingly.

So in these clubs it was difficult to get the phrase “I’m not getting acquainted” - if a man or girl is sitting at a table alone, most likely they came just to get acquainted. By the way, girls, of course, more often waited for a call or a note, but they could also get acquainted themselves by calling or writing to the man they liked.



Tables in Resi nightclubs

In Femin, for example, there were about 2 thousand seats, with about 250 tables with everything necessary for getting to know each other - a telephone, a beautiful “exhaust pipe” of a pneumatic mail and a number glowing above the table. This number was a contact number - you had to send a note or call using these treasured numbers.

Journalists of the time, describing the unusual innovations, called the system of telephones and pneumatic tubes that united all the club tables “the big bait.” It was described like this: “Single people can call or send a note to fellow single women who look like they would like company.”

Sounds like modern dating sites, right?

By the way, not only the local press wrote about the innovation; one might say, the system received international recognition - for example, among the guests of these clubs there were always many Americans. And the instructions that came with each table with telephone and pneumatic mail were available in German and English - like “language versions” of Internet sites.



This was also filmed at the Resi nightclub

A completely logical question: why do you need notes if you have a telephone? However, this is easy to understand - people don’t change, and now many would prefer a text message in the messenger rather than a “voice call”. Many girls - even in such an establishment where everything is clear to everyone - were embarrassed to pick up the phone.

Therefore, there was always special paper for notes on the table - visitors only had to indicate to which table they wanted to send their messages. This is the prototype of modern online dating.

Even the problems are the same: on a dating site the moderator may have deleted your message, in these nightclubs it was the same.

For example, in the Resi club, all notes were checked by special female censors. They say that women received many “provocative” messages in private messages. It was to save them from obvious vulgarity or rudeness that such censors were needed. Sometimes theyIt was hard—more than one thousand such notes could be sent overnight.



And this is Femina Palace. In the archive photo you can see such light dots near the tables - these, apparently, are their “contact numbers”

By the way, they flourished in the clubs - and clearly created a good part of the profit, that’s where the similarities with modern dating sites are - all kinds of gifts that “boyfriends” sent to the girls they liked. And these were not beautiful postcards, like an analogue of stickers, but real gifts.

It was possible to purchase and then send things such as a bottle of perfume, for example, through the same pneumatic mail tube.

It is believed that the peak of popularity of the new way of meeting people came in 1931. Although the idea itself remained relevant for a very long time - Americans talked about how they met in such clubs after World War II, apparently in “their” occupation zone of Berlin. In some clubs the communication system itself has been preserved to this day, but, apparently, is no longer in use.



They say that in the Berlin BallHaus the system even still works - these are the numbers at the tables, at least you can see