A brief history of the smoking room
Smoking room – a room in which smokers are allowed to smoke
There is no doubt about it: smoking is harmful to health, not only for the smokers themselves, but also for those who smoke involuntarily (passive smoking). The proportion of smokers worldwide has been declining for years, even though more people, especially young people, have taken up cigarettes again since the pandemic.
Today, smoking is socially undesirable; there is a broad social consensus in the fight against smoking. In most countries, measures are taken to protect non-smokers and warn against the consequences of smoking – with drastic warnings on cigarette packages, advertising bans, smoking bans in public places and high taxation of tobacco products.
And what about the remaining smokers?
According to the World Health Organisation’s global report on trends in prevalence of tobacco use, in 2000, around a third of the global population aged 15 years and older were using tobacco products. By 2020, the prevalence of tobacco use had fallen to 22.3% and is expected to continue declining to around 20% by 2025. This is roughly one in five employees, restaurant visitors, nursing home residents, air travellers…
In many institutions and companies, a professionally equipped smoking room is a proven way to provide smokers with a legal and safe opportunity to smoke while fully respecting the protection of non-smokers. This also prevents people from smoking secretly in the toilet or storage room. This is not only unpleasant, it is literally a fire hazard.
A smoking room – by the way, this is not an invention of the last decades!
Typical gents = smoking room
With a dinner jacket into the smoking room
The smoking room or smoking salon used to be (and still is in Switzerland) nobly called “fumoir”. It originated in Europe in the 17th century with the tobacco culture and was originally found in stately homes. There, the gentlemen (and only they, for ladies the enjoyment of tobacco was taboo) retired to smoke after dinner. In the German-speaking world, the term “Herrenzimmer” (gentlemen’s room) was coined for this purpose (because it was a place for gentlemen to smoke and be themselves).
The fumoirs were usually furnished with comfortable upholstered furniture to encourage casual conversation. Often there were also gaming tables or a billiard table. Splendidly equipped fumoirs were also found in elegant hotels and restaurants, in luxury steamships and luxury trains. Since the fumoirs were not yet equipped with smoke extractors at that time, the blue fumes got caught in the clothing.
This gave rise to the custom of changing clothes when entering the smoking room. The garment that one put on for this purpose was called a smoking jacket or – would you have known? – Smoking.
Smoking.
This was a jacket, usually made of velvet, which the gentlemen exchanged for their original jacket, usually a tailcoat, after the official part of the evening when they retired to the smoking room to smoke or play cards. When the smoking was put on, the official part of the evening was over. Smoking sounds very English – but it is not used in the English-speaking world. What we call a smoking is called a dinner jacket in British English and a tuxedo in American.
Fumoir : Smoking room (smoking salon) on the Schnelldampher “Kaiser Wilhelm der Große”. | Foto: Wikimedia
Without plush and dinner jackets – and without the smell of tobacco
The Ordinance on Workplaces of 2004 and the Act on Protection from the Hazards of Passive Smoking of 2007 still allow smoking rooms in companies and in some public institutions in Germany. These no longer have anything to do with plush, nor would it occur to anyone to put on a smoking.
Thanks to the smoking room, colleagues do not have to go out for a short smoke break at work. And neither do the residents of care facilities. At airports, smoking lounges bridge the nervous waiting time before departure.
But all this without smoke screens and the smell of stale cigarette smoke. Modern smoking lounges have air purification systems – we at Euromate recommend our Smoke ‘n Go cabin or our VisionAir BlueLine SmokeFree on a recirculation basis – that extract cigarette smoke and neutralise odours. And so, while they may not be plush, they do have something of luxury – the luxury of clean air outside and even inside.
Also a smoking room – but not nice
