Automation In British Pubs

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30914, 22 November 1965, Page 13

Automation In British Pubs

(Special Correspondent TCZ.P.A.) LONDON, November 21. Patrons in a pub in London’s East End can now order their drinks without asking for them and have them delivered by a genie—in this case a beaming Cockney barmaid.

Ten tables in the pub’s restaurant have had tele-phone-style dials fitted to them and a “menu” gives a choice of over 200 drinks, ranging from light ale to champagne.

Each drink has a code number and when the number is dialled the signal is sent to a “programme serialiser” tucked amid tins of turtle soup beneath the stairs. This clucks and rattles over the order, translating it into a message which appears on a cash register in the bar, as, “Table Two, 106, 113, 121, 7/6.”

“After the barmaid has put on her glasses, translated the figures into drinks and taken off her glasses, she delivers the order to an impressed group sitting at a table many yards away,” says “The Times.”

The system has been tested in a Bolton, Lancashire, public house, where the locals now invite each other to have a “124,” instead of a pint of the usual.

If bar-room orators pale at the thought of automation in pubs, the system also avoids the language difficulties involved in ordering a bottle of Niersteiner Gutes Domthal.