‘We Matched An Older Brother With His Younger Sister’: The Rocky 1960s Origins Of Online Dating
In 1966, the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World visited a party in New York organised by the electronic dating service Tact, or Technical Automated Compatibility Testing. Around 2,000 singles were invited to Manhattan to try out this modern method of matchmaking.
In 1788, a man going by the name of “AB” placed New York’s first known personal ad in the Impartial Gazetteer, according to historian Francesa Beauman. He was seeking a woman “under 40, not deformed, and in possession of at least one thousand pounds”. Describing himself as “a young gentleman of family and fortune, who is lately come to town”, the ad was the Tinder bio of its day. Whether AB had any replies to his ad is unknown. But nearly 200 years later, New York was the home of another novel approach to dating – computer matchmaking.
