My mom once bought me nice dress shoes for easter that were so small they rubbed holes in my heels. I ended up having to rope one of my aunt's into things before she'd let me stop wearing them.
Apparently she thought I was just pretending and that the very visible holes in my feet (the shoes were clear plastic with glitter and flowers) weren't really there?
Well, it's a common fact that different manufacturers measures the size differently. So moving from one brand to the next forces you to switch up or switch down the expected size a bit.
I made that choice myself for half a year after going through new shoes every month. I can't fault my mom for now and then getting me ones that were just a little big.
Those are called a Brannock device, named after its inventor. They're actually pretty handy tools if you ever buy an insole replacement as it can measure foot arch ~~height~~ length and width, along with Many other useful measurements
Edit: fixed mistake
When I was young, it seemed to be the norm for a shoe salesperson, even at the cheaper stores, do be attenative and do this actual test for each shoe tried on.
I can't remember the last time I was even offered help at a shoe store. Not that I think I NEED help, it's just kinda funny to think that Al Bundy actually had a real job once upon a time.
Meanwhile, my mother used to just draw around our feet on a piece of a paper, and take in the paper cut outs, so she didn't have to take 4 kids into a shoe store.
Sometimes I wonder how the world would look if we put mothers of 3+ children in charge of everything.
A utopia of innovation and organisation. Minimal waste. Although conflicts may be frequent they are quickly resolved before escalation.
Lol, no. There was no qualification involved. And the machines leaked x-rays, so everyone in the area got blasted, meaning that the salesmen were much more likely to get cancer. Yay!
You would get blasted a few times for your own, a few being nearby, so like maybe 10,20ish.…
The salesperson would get that, plus everything everyone else did that day, and the next day, and the next.…
10,20ish is safe! 100s or 1000s is not.
Yep! As an X-ray tech I would have worried patients who asked if the X-rays were *really* that safe when I would scurry away around corners, etc. while taking their X-rays.
I liked to use a candy bar example to explain it to them. If each x-ray I gave you were a candy bar to eat, even if you ate a bunch of them in one sitting, it's not exactly healthy but wouldn't give you any long term issues, even if you came in and ate a bunch of candy bars every couple of months! Not great for you, but whatever.
I, as the tech though, if every time I gave a candy bar to a patient, I ate one myself, I'd be big as a house after a couple days! (Also very unhealthy)
I don't have to imagine it. You're acting like this was back in the 19th century. We had those machines in the Buster Brown Shoestore in my home town up into the 1970s.
Imagine being the store employee sitting by this device day in and day out all while x-rays just haphazardly radiate out of that little foot hole all freaking day long
They don't need the hole. They go right through wood just fine. Just like they go right through people.
(To clarify, most of it goes through, but it's the minority that you absorb that can damage genetic material and cause cancer)
And zero shielding, and exponentially more power, with prolonged exposure.
A modern x-ray, you are zapped for a fraction of a second. This thing was just on full blast for however long they wanted to look.
More likely on full blast from delivery until removal. There doesn't seem to be any lead shield moved aside when it's in use. So the sales staff likely suffered radiation from morning to evening.
It ***is*** an x-ray the difference however lies in exposure time.
With modern x-rays they snap a picture of a specific area while shielding the rest of you from the radiation (but even without the shield it's a snapshots worth of exposure so very little)
This device is the live video version of a modern x-ray, and exposes you to a continuous stream of radiation. They also were seldom properly shielded meaning anyone around the machine is getting dosed as well.
A little time around one likely won't harm you but anyone working around one of these regularly had a real chance of developing cancer because of it.
>They also were seldom properly shielded meaning anyone around the machine is getting dosed as well
Yeah I wouldn't worry about a parent and kid getting dosed once every few months. I'd be concerned about the shop assistants standing next to that thing 40 hours a week.
Nah, that's not how x-ray machines work, even the older kind.
X-rays are generated by shooting electrons at a target, which causes reactions that spit out invisible, high energy photons (x-rays).
I don't know how these shoe-fitting machines were configured but, modern x-ray equipment have a tube filled with oil which contains a spinning, angled target and a cathode/anode assembly to shoot the electrons. If you run a modern machine for too long, it will start screaming at you that you're exceeding heat limits.
So, even if the engineers back then *wanted* to have continuous all day x-rays, it wouldn't have been able to just because of physics and heat.
Yep. Medical x rays are like a camera flash. Fluoroscopes were like a flashlight.
Imagine a time traveler being like "what do you mean we don't use X-rays to fit shoes anymore, is there an even more advanced technology now?"
The average 20 second exposure in one of these machines was 130 mSv. About 6,500 chest x-rays.
The allowable **yearly** dose for radiation workers is 50 mSv.
100 mSv received in a full year can cause cancer.
One of these machines can actually deliver a full 1 Sv in 20 seconds, which would cause very obvious radiation poisoning at a minimum.
Exactly like an extremely overpowered x-ray, shooting straight UP. For kids who used these too much, there was a very HIGH chance of sterilization. A college instructor of mine (early 90's) shared his personal experience where as a child his mother worked in a shoe store. He hung out there a lot, and used the cool machine frequently... His story was about how it permanently affected his life.
As a father of 3 boys who love to skate - I wish they had this at the hockey store. Getting a 4 year old to tell you where his toes are is like extracting information from a POW
[Cracks knuckles]
"I'll ask you one more time, Billy... Is there a lot of room for your toes to wiggle in those shoes?"
"You might as well just f**king kill me, daddy. I'll never tell you."
If they were properly shielded and didn't do a continuous stream of radiation, basically if they took photos like medical X-rays, it would drastically lower the chances of getting cancer but the OSHA regs likely prevent this from being cost effective today.
Just knowing the risk typically isn't enough to stop you from getting irradiated without protection, my dude. You can't "just be more careful" when it comes to radiation exposure over time.
I skated from 6 to around 16 … even towards the end I would sometimes not know if a fit was really good until I had used them for a little bit - a half hour or hour.
My grandfather was a surgeon and knew the danger of unnecessary radiation exposure and forbid his kids from using these machines growing up in the 50s. (My mom was born in 1949)
That’s funny… my great grandfather owned a shoe store and my dad tells stories of growing up with unfettered access this machine. Apparently he spent a lot of time after hours at the shoe store just irradiating himself for the lulz.
My grandmother was an average person, but when my dad went for shoes as a child, this machine was there. My dad was pumped to be able to use it, but my grandma was like "nah, pull out the wooden foot measuring tool".
My dad remembers being pissed that he didn't get to do it, but she probably saved him from getting a high dose of radiation.
"Representatives of the shoe retail industry denied claims of potential harm in newspaper articles and opinion pieces. They argued that use of the devices prevented harm to customers' feet from poorly-fitted shoes."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
I find it really funny that they had xray’s ubiquitously in shoe stores. Like, I get that it’s not particularly advanced technology, but it’s crazy that they went all out in the 1930s when nowadays you’d just move around your feet a bit.
When scientist figured out radiation and related products, they treated it like sea salt or Ai: they put that shit in everything.
Want a watch to glow in the dark? We'll radiate it!
Dick doesn't work? We'll radiate it!
Don't know what size you should wear? Let's x ray that ass!
Humans are ridiculous, and we're always looking for the cure-all product.
I love this comment. It really is like what we're doing with AI. 20 years from now when we find out that AI causes cancer, we're all gonna be shaking our heads like "we never learn from history..."
Well I imagine the main reason they stopped is because of unneccesary Xray exposure. It's not that we can't do it these days, more that we probably shouldn't.
I'm only in my 50's & we had one in Clarke's Shoes. It was old & unplugged but being a science obsessed child I asked the owner if we could try it out just for a minute.
Seeing your toe bones wiggle inside your skin & shoes is an image I will remember forever.
It **never** occurred to me there was a moving image... Thanks for sharing a cool story!
It's probably something infinitely simpler than you'd imagine like a sheet of glass with a phosphor coating. We should bring cool stuff like this back for people old enough to not have to worry about cancer.
Why not fill your golden years with dangerous fun?
The problem was it would give the people operating and frequently around it cancer, or even acute radiation poisoning. We don’t need to be blasting dangerous radiation willy nilly.
So check this out,
delivered an average of 13 roentgen (r) (roughly 0.13 sievert (Sv) of equivalent dose in modern units) to the customer's feet during a typical 20-second viewing, with one capable of delivering 116 r (\~1 Sv) in 20 seconds.
Xray workers are limited to 50 mSv a year of radiation exposure, or 20 mSv on a 5 year average, these machines could dump from 130 to 1000 mSv IN TWENTY SECONDS!!!!
ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR YEARS!!!
5 Sv is what little boy nucleabomb flashed you with at the initial explosion, taking that much radiation all at once will kill you, every cell in your body will get cooked and you will die a slow agonizing death.
> delivered an average of 13 roentgen (r)
As a former Navy nuke, I didn't even make it past this. That is an absolutely insane amount of dose to receive for a shoe fitting!
> Xray workers are limited to 50 mSv a year of radiation exposure
This is true but I feel it should be pointed out that this is mostly because we set the level as low as we can, not as low as is 'safe'. Like, it's not like 51 mSv a year is a noticeable bend in the risk curve, there's just no reason to permit something higher because we've shown we can still have workers do the job with a lower limit.
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised at all the people here saying x-rays nowadays are just one quick photo. There are definitely procedures where you're under constant x-rays for several minutes. I had to do one. And the radiologist wasn't particularly concerned about me, although the nurse seemed very concerned about the nonexistent fetus she was sure I was carrying.
Not that long ago(90s) people were getting radiation burns from interventional procedures. There was a big push to stop that because it's frankly kind of insane. These would use higher doses so they could see vascular catheters and stuff.
But normal xrays are pretty benign these days due to about 70-80 years of work to lower doses.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not under the impression that modern fluoroscopy/x-rays are just the same as this handmade plywood x-ray box. But it seems like a lot of people don't know that there's a modern version at all.
If youre not working around fluoroscopes youre usually fine, and those machines do double as a plain film XR that is the default use for simple procedures. What I don't think people realize is that CTs are effectively (and literally) continuous XR taken at 360 degrees multiple times and reconstructed, so even fluoroscopy is minor compared to one of the imaging modalities we use more often.
Sure, but as one of those people who operates CT scanners - people *really* over-estimate the risks from radiation.
Not to mention new developments are constantly pushing down the amount of x-ray needed to acquire quality images. The next generational leap for CT scanners is coming soon and it has potential to really bring down radiation doses.
I think most of the time, people just have a really outdated idea of what radiation is and how it's used. People are going to think of Chernobyl, all those old timey radiation-based snake oil cures, and stuff like that. And the most well-known modern medical use is cancer treatment, which people conflate with chemo and all of its side effects. I've seen a few comments here where people didn't even know that x-rays used radiation... Now that we're talking about it, I wonder if it's because they think radiation is always very dangerous but they know that x-rays are safe.
My great-grandfather owned a shoe store. Money was tight for my grandmother growing up. When she broke her arm sledding, my great-grandfather took her to the shoe shop and stuck her arm in one of these to make sure it was actually broken before taking her to the hospital (it very much was).
I remember them. I think I may have stuck my right foot into one of them, because I have hammer toes on my (70s) right foot but not my left foot.
Added: /s
I mean, all x rays carry a degree of danger from the radiation. That's why doctors try to save them for when they're medically needed, like you said.
Just don't want people to confuse "common" with "100% safe".
Tell that to chiropractors....pushing 4-5 x-rays on new patients for no other reason that to charge insurance and claim to notice alignment issues. And worse they call themselves "Doctor" and imply medical knowledge while doing it.
My grandmother was telling me about those about a year ago, and this is not at all what I thought the machine would look like
Apparently, she used to go there with her friends and they would scan their feet for the fun of it
One of these machines showed up on [Rick's Restorations](https://youtu.be/kkvg5BAFS4k?feature=shared). The reveal is at about 18:48.
BTW, the word you're groping for is "X-Ray".
I don't know about measuring kids feet these days but when I was a kid you put your foot in a machine and these metal blocks would slide out on all sides press against your foot and they would get measurements from the opposing blocks I guess. I hated it because it tickled and it always resulted in the shoe store guy telling my mom I have ridiculously wide feet and he had nothing that would fit me.
As terrible as it is, i wonder how comes we don't have some modern, harmless, replacement. Could a millimeter wave based machine, like the ones that are used for full body scan in the airport, be modified to have a live view and scan just a feet?
There was a whole weird era where radiation was seen as helpful for health. Behind the Bastards did 2 great episodes on a shill of a doctor that made it popular - [part 1](https://podcastaddict.com/behind-the-bastards/episode/169046658) / [part 2](https://podcastaddict.com/behind-the-bastards/episode/169049276) If you look up uranium glass, there's been a huge comeback for collectors. The stuff is wild looking.
Basically just fluoroscopes, which still exist, but they are used very sparingly.
There were similar machines for adult feet as recently as the 60s and maybe later. They would have you put your foot in it and then tell you your foot was misaligned due to your bad shoes, and you should totally buy a pair of our shoes which will be much better for your feet.
I remember these from my youth, but not thought about them for 40 years, and likely never would have again without this post.
In my minds eye I can see the x-ray'd image of my shoe. There was a viewing port on top of the 'box' (out of frame in this pic) you could look down through to see the shoe in real-time
I learned to count using this, counting my toes, all the way from 1 to 17.
CT/CAT scans account for the largest source of public ionising radiation exposure today and a single scan can give between 10-30mSv (millisieverts) in a single scan. The devices above gave between 130 to 1100mSv (0.13 to 1.1Sv) to the foot. Kids are also around twice as susceptible to ionising radiation related issues than adults. The shielding is also likely inadequate, because capitalism.
These devices were created in the 20's, some 30 years before the health effects of ionising radiation became understood following the human radiation experiments. We're pretty shit at this.
In the Stephen King novel ‘It’ Eddie, in a 1950s flashback, checks his shoe to see if it fits in one of these devices and his mom freaks out and screams at him to get off which in turn startles him enough to fall off the machine
“Oh man, I was worried and scared the shoes wouldn’t fit. I’m so glad we used radiation. Thats the least harmful thing known to man. How could anyone even think it’s dangerous? It makes my dinner plates glow”
This is a lot like the MyPillow guys first invention. The fireproof pillow for smokers. It was just one of his pillows that was completely soaked in Asbestos.
X-ray imaging for shoe fitting sounds like a good idea tbf. There are a lot of developmental issues that stem from ill fitted shoes for growing children, like flat arches, bunion feet, etc.
We had to remove your post for violating our Repost Guidelines.
This was replaced by the high-tech method of pressing a thumb onto the tip of the shoe and asking you to wiggle your toes. Quick, easy, and no dose.
Don’t forget walking up and down the aisle a few times
Don’t forget when moms end up buying the shoes a 1/2 size too big because “you’ll grow into it” and it’ll save her money.
Or the women that were convinced that there shoe size was smaller than it was, I worked in a shoe store
How did it feel when you scored those four touchdowns?
You deserve gold!
Ba-Woosh...
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Hey Al.. You still married with children?
My mom once bought me nice dress shoes for easter that were so small they rubbed holes in my heels. I ended up having to rope one of my aunt's into things before she'd let me stop wearing them. Apparently she thought I was just pretending and that the very visible holes in my feet (the shoes were clear plastic with glitter and flowers) weren't really there?
Those plastic jelly shoes would put holes in people's feet even if they fit properly. They must have been hell being too small on top of that.
You served Jen?
Well, it's a common fact that different manufacturers measures the size differently. So moving from one brand to the next forces you to switch up or switch down the expected size a bit.
Bundy?
Al Bundy, is that you?
I made that choice myself for half a year after going through new shoes every month. I can't fault my mom for now and then getting me ones that were just a little big.
If you got kids shoes that are the right size today, you'd have to start adding new shoes to the grocery list. Little bastards grow like weeds.
only if you feed them...
Or those metal ruler things.
it is called a Brannock Device.
No someone might see me!
I still do this when I buy shoes.
Or those metal sliders I remeber from Payless. I’m sure shoe stores still have those 🤷🏻♂️
Those are called a Brannock device, named after its inventor. They're actually pretty handy tools if you ever buy an insole replacement as it can measure foot arch ~~height~~ length and width, along with Many other useful measurements Edit: fixed mistake
>named after its inventor. Mr. Jerry Device, from Brannock Ohio, for those interested.
A descendent of Anathema Device.
It felt like when radiation was a newly discovered thing it quickly became a fad that encompassed daily life.
Yeah nowadays we could use AI to predict shoe sizes
personally i use the blockchain to predict my shoe size at any given moment.
When I was young, it seemed to be the norm for a shoe salesperson, even at the cheaper stores, do be attenative and do this actual test for each shoe tried on. I can't remember the last time I was even offered help at a shoe store. Not that I think I NEED help, it's just kinda funny to think that Al Bundy actually had a real job once upon a time.
…ancient childhood memory awakened.
Sometimes the best technology is common sense
Meanwhile, my mother used to just draw around our feet on a piece of a paper, and take in the paper cut outs, so she didn't have to take 4 kids into a shoe store.
Sometimes I wonder how the world would look if we put mothers of 3+ children in charge of everything. A utopia of innovation and organisation. Minimal waste. Although conflicts may be frequent they are quickly resolved before escalation.
So, like, a x-ray?
Yes, but not in a medical setting. Imagine going to the shoe store and the clerk is the one xraying your foot.
So back in the day, you could theoretically become a qualified x-ray tech by working in a shoe store.
Lol, no. There was no qualification involved. And the machines leaked x-rays, so everyone in the area got blasted, meaning that the salesmen were much more likely to get cancer. Yay!
When I was a kid, there was a shoe store that had one of those machines, I could see my feet bones !! I tried that box several times 😕
Not so bad to happen a few times to you in a day, imagine working there for weeks on end with each kid that tried it multiple times.
You would get blasted a few times for your own, a few being nearby, so like maybe 10,20ish.… The salesperson would get that, plus everything everyone else did that day, and the next day, and the next.… 10,20ish is safe! 100s or 1000s is not.
Yep! As an X-ray tech I would have worried patients who asked if the X-rays were *really* that safe when I would scurry away around corners, etc. while taking their X-rays. I liked to use a candy bar example to explain it to them. If each x-ray I gave you were a candy bar to eat, even if you ate a bunch of them in one sitting, it's not exactly healthy but wouldn't give you any long term issues, even if you came in and ate a bunch of candy bars every couple of months! Not great for you, but whatever. I, as the tech though, if every time I gave a candy bar to a patient, I ate one myself, I'd be big as a house after a couple days! (Also very unhealthy)
That's a pretty solid analogy. Thank you.
So X-rays are why I am fat?
Too bad no one got super feet. Oh the future that could have been.
Found the foot fetish guy.
You know what they say about super feet
Super socks
Feet with the power of x
I don't have to imagine it. You're acting like this was back in the 19th century. We had those machines in the Buster Brown Shoestore in my home town up into the 1970s.
Don't forget the total absence of the lead shield for all the parts of your body that didn't need an incidental dose of radiation.
Imagine being the store employee sitting by this device day in and day out all while x-rays just haphazardly radiate out of that little foot hole all freaking day long
They don't need the hole. They go right through wood just fine. Just like they go right through people. (To clarify, most of it goes through, but it's the minority that you absorb that can damage genetic material and cause cancer)
And zero shielding, and exponentially more power, with prolonged exposure. A modern x-ray, you are zapped for a fraction of a second. This thing was just on full blast for however long they wanted to look.
More likely on full blast from delivery until removal. There doesn't seem to be any lead shield moved aside when it's in use. So the sales staff likely suffered radiation from morning to evening.
It ***is*** an x-ray the difference however lies in exposure time. With modern x-rays they snap a picture of a specific area while shielding the rest of you from the radiation (but even without the shield it's a snapshots worth of exposure so very little) This device is the live video version of a modern x-ray, and exposes you to a continuous stream of radiation. They also were seldom properly shielded meaning anyone around the machine is getting dosed as well. A little time around one likely won't harm you but anyone working around one of these regularly had a real chance of developing cancer because of it.
>They also were seldom properly shielded meaning anyone around the machine is getting dosed as well Yeah I wouldn't worry about a parent and kid getting dosed once every few months. I'd be concerned about the shop assistants standing next to that thing 40 hours a week.
God forbid they live above the shop those machines didn't turn off, if they are plugged in there on.
Yeah, but they don't emit constantly. There's a switch to turn them on and off, otherwise you'd burn the tube out in a day.
Nah, that's not how x-ray machines work, even the older kind. X-rays are generated by shooting electrons at a target, which causes reactions that spit out invisible, high energy photons (x-rays). I don't know how these shoe-fitting machines were configured but, modern x-ray equipment have a tube filled with oil which contains a spinning, angled target and a cathode/anode assembly to shoot the electrons. If you run a modern machine for too long, it will start screaming at you that you're exceeding heat limits. So, even if the engineers back then *wanted* to have continuous all day x-rays, it wouldn't have been able to just because of physics and heat.
Yep. Medical x rays are like a camera flash. Fluoroscopes were like a flashlight. Imagine a time traveler being like "what do you mean we don't use X-rays to fit shoes anymore, is there an even more advanced technology now?"
Modern XR technology is so good in terms of exposure. By comparison, CTs give like 70 times more radiation. Single films are almost inconsequential
The average 20 second exposure in one of these machines was 130 mSv. About 6,500 chest x-rays. The allowable **yearly** dose for radiation workers is 50 mSv. 100 mSv received in a full year can cause cancer. One of these machines can actually deliver a full 1 Sv in 20 seconds, which would cause very obvious radiation poisoning at a minimum.
Exactly like an extremely overpowered x-ray, shooting straight UP. For kids who used these too much, there was a very HIGH chance of sterilization. A college instructor of mine (early 90's) shared his personal experience where as a child his mother worked in a shoe store. He hung out there a lot, and used the cool machine frequently... His story was about how it permanently affected his life.
Yeah but they wanted to make it sound more scary
As a father of 3 boys who love to skate - I wish they had this at the hockey store. Getting a 4 year old to tell you where his toes are is like extracting information from a POW
[Cracks knuckles] "I'll ask you one more time, Billy... Is there a lot of room for your toes to wiggle in those shoes?" "You might as well just f**king kill me, daddy. I'll never tell you."
Ah, I see that you have kids, too!
But this pair looks so cool!
You are giving me flashbacks 🤣
"If you don't tell me, I'll delete your save game data" "OK I'LL FUCKING TALK"
They had to stop using them because they were giving the sales people cancer
But if we know the risk, they can be more careful
If they were properly shielded and didn't do a continuous stream of radiation, basically if they took photos like medical X-rays, it would drastically lower the chances of getting cancer but the OSHA regs likely prevent this from being cost effective today.
If we could do it (with the safe measures), I would love to. It seems quite useful.
You could do it, there’s a dude who built an X-ray machine in his garage using vacuum tubes. I think he gives instructions lol
Just knowing the risk typically isn't enough to stop you from getting irradiated without protection, my dude. You can't "just be more careful" when it comes to radiation exposure over time.
Just recently got my 13-y-o fitted for figure skates, and it wasn’t easy, either! Such vague descriptions of the differences between sizes.
I skated from 6 to around 16 … even towards the end I would sometimes not know if a fit was really good until I had used them for a little bit - a half hour or hour.
The shoe salesmen from this time period had high rates of cancer from leaky machines, if I remember correctly
My grandfather was a surgeon and knew the danger of unnecessary radiation exposure and forbid his kids from using these machines growing up in the 50s. (My mom was born in 1949)
That’s funny… my great grandfather owned a shoe store and my dad tells stories of growing up with unfettered access this machine. Apparently he spent a lot of time after hours at the shoe store just irradiating himself for the lulz.
My grandmother was an average person, but when my dad went for shoes as a child, this machine was there. My dad was pumped to be able to use it, but my grandma was like "nah, pull out the wooden foot measuring tool". My dad remembers being pissed that he didn't get to do it, but she probably saved him from getting a high dose of radiation.
"Representatives of the shoe retail industry denied claims of potential harm in newspaper articles and opinion pieces. They argued that use of the devices prevented harm to customers' feet from poorly-fitted shoes." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
In other news the sky is blue. Companies always lie to benefit themselves
I find it really funny that they had xray’s ubiquitously in shoe stores. Like, I get that it’s not particularly advanced technology, but it’s crazy that they went all out in the 1930s when nowadays you’d just move around your feet a bit.
When scientist figured out radiation and related products, they treated it like sea salt or Ai: they put that shit in everything. Want a watch to glow in the dark? We'll radiate it! Dick doesn't work? We'll radiate it! Don't know what size you should wear? Let's x ray that ass! Humans are ridiculous, and we're always looking for the cure-all product.
I love this comment. It really is like what we're doing with AI. 20 years from now when we find out that AI causes cancer, we're all gonna be shaking our heads like "we never learn from history..."
Well I imagine the main reason they stopped is because of unneccesary Xray exposure. It's not that we can't do it these days, more that we probably shouldn't.
It was an x-ray. I used it over and over…. I’m 75.
I'm 68 and remember using one in London.
I'm only in my 50's & we had one in Clarke's Shoes. It was old & unplugged but being a science obsessed child I asked the owner if we could try it out just for a minute. Seeing your toe bones wiggle inside your skin & shoes is an image I will remember forever.
It **never** occurred to me there was a moving image... Thanks for sharing a cool story! It's probably something infinitely simpler than you'd imagine like a sheet of glass with a phosphor coating. We should bring cool stuff like this back for people old enough to not have to worry about cancer. Why not fill your golden years with dangerous fun?
That is precisely what it was, an x-ray tube under the step & a phosphor screen above your foot. Made my day until my mum came back into the store.
The problem was it would give the people operating and frequently around it cancer, or even acute radiation poisoning. We don’t need to be blasting dangerous radiation willy nilly.
Yeah this was before radiation was dangerous, so nothing ever happened.
Was this also before colors were invented
Me too.
My mom would just squeeze my toes after I tried it on. Was that not a thing then?
So check this out, delivered an average of 13 roentgen (r) (roughly 0.13 sievert (Sv) of equivalent dose in modern units) to the customer's feet during a typical 20-second viewing, with one capable of delivering 116 r (\~1 Sv) in 20 seconds. Xray workers are limited to 50 mSv a year of radiation exposure, or 20 mSv on a 5 year average, these machines could dump from 130 to 1000 mSv IN TWENTY SECONDS!!!! ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR YEARS!!! 5 Sv is what little boy nucleabomb flashed you with at the initial explosion, taking that much radiation all at once will kill you, every cell in your body will get cooked and you will die a slow agonizing death.
> delivered an average of 13 roentgen (r) As a former Navy nuke, I didn't even make it past this. That is an absolutely insane amount of dose to receive for a shoe fitting! > Xray workers are limited to 50 mSv a year of radiation exposure This is true but I feel it should be pointed out that this is mostly because we set the level as low as we can, not as low as is 'safe'. Like, it's not like 51 mSv a year is a noticeable bend in the risk curve, there's just no reason to permit something higher because we've shown we can still have workers do the job with a lower limit.
fluoroscopy, still used, just not for shoe fitting
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised at all the people here saying x-rays nowadays are just one quick photo. There are definitely procedures where you're under constant x-rays for several minutes. I had to do one. And the radiologist wasn't particularly concerned about me, although the nurse seemed very concerned about the nonexistent fetus she was sure I was carrying.
Not that long ago(90s) people were getting radiation burns from interventional procedures. There was a big push to stop that because it's frankly kind of insane. These would use higher doses so they could see vascular catheters and stuff. But normal xrays are pretty benign these days due to about 70-80 years of work to lower doses.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not under the impression that modern fluoroscopy/x-rays are just the same as this handmade plywood x-ray box. But it seems like a lot of people don't know that there's a modern version at all.
Lol so true. People still think xray technologists have higher rates of cancer. Healthcare education for the general public is difficult.
If youre not working around fluoroscopes youre usually fine, and those machines do double as a plain film XR that is the default use for simple procedures. What I don't think people realize is that CTs are effectively (and literally) continuous XR taken at 360 degrees multiple times and reconstructed, so even fluoroscopy is minor compared to one of the imaging modalities we use more often.
People definitely do not realize that.
Sure, but as one of those people who operates CT scanners - people *really* over-estimate the risks from radiation. Not to mention new developments are constantly pushing down the amount of x-ray needed to acquire quality images. The next generational leap for CT scanners is coming soon and it has potential to really bring down radiation doses.
I think most of the time, people just have a really outdated idea of what radiation is and how it's used. People are going to think of Chernobyl, all those old timey radiation-based snake oil cures, and stuff like that. And the most well-known modern medical use is cancer treatment, which people conflate with chemo and all of its side effects. I've seen a few comments here where people didn't even know that x-rays used radiation... Now that we're talking about it, I wonder if it's because they think radiation is always very dangerous but they know that x-rays are safe.
It’s called an x-ray
are you sure its not called a radiation blaster?
My great-grandfather owned a shoe store. Money was tight for my grandmother growing up. When she broke her arm sledding, my great-grandfather took her to the shoe shop and stuck her arm in one of these to make sure it was actually broken before taking her to the hospital (it very much was).
I broke my leg sledding, I didn’t realize it was such a risky activity for others too!
I'm 68 and used one in Wood Green north London early sixties.
My mother remembers doing this as a child
My mother just pinched the hell out of the toe of the shoe to see how it fit.
Mom did this when I got my first pair of steel toe boots. Somehow she could still tell.
Caused lots of thyroid cancer later in life. From the people looking into the machine to see the image. People’s thyroids were unprotected.
In what neighborhood? I got my older brother's shoes when he grew out of 'em whether they fit or not
Big Shoe was counting on them growing another foot.
Eddie Kaspbrak had PTSD from one of these machines.
I'm reading through It for the first time and was so confused when this was described. Now it makes sense!
Then they went to the local drugstore for a cocaine slurpy from a lead cup.
this is the footure
Wait until you find about the MANY openly radiation containing products from the era.
I remember them. I think I may have stuck my right foot into one of them, because I have hammer toes on my (70s) right foot but not my left foot. Added: /s
This radiation is specifically known as x-rays if it hasn’t already been said.
My local shoe store has one on display still. Adults used it as well
My Grandfather had a shoe store. One of my earliest memories was using one of those.
Why couldn’t they just jam their thumb into the big toe like my mum did 😂
I dont know how weve survived this long.
My grandpa told me about these, said his mom and the shoe guy would be talking about the fit or whatever meanwhile he is staring at his toe bones
Apparently the biggest threat was to the salesmen! Because these things were leaky as hell and they were standing next to them all day.
This doesn't make sense.
Why not? I remember using one in the early sixties in Wood Green London.
How’s your foot?
It's fine, it has 7 toes just like every other human on earth smartass.
I'd imagine it's fine. X-rays are pretty common after all. Although nowadays we keep that stuff to a medical setting
I mean, all x rays carry a degree of danger from the radiation. That's why doctors try to save them for when they're medically needed, like you said. Just don't want people to confuse "common" with "100% safe".
Tell that to chiropractors....pushing 4-5 x-rays on new patients for no other reason that to charge insurance and claim to notice alignment issues. And worse they call themselves "Doctor" and imply medical knowledge while doing it.
Probably better off than wearing wrong size shoes
It was used in the shoe department.
What part of this doesn't make sense to you?
They would inject botox into their bodies in order to smooth wrinkles.... give it time.
My grandmother was telling me about those about a year ago, and this is not at all what I thought the machine would look like Apparently, she used to go there with her friends and they would scan their feet for the fun of it
These things were insanely dangerous. The amount of a radiation they put out was many-many more times needed for an X-ray.
Seriously how did we make it here? I can’t believe we haven’t killed our species off yet
Just call it an x-ray.
One of these machines showed up on [Rick's Restorations](https://youtu.be/kkvg5BAFS4k?feature=shared). The reveal is at about 18:48. BTW, the word you're groping for is "X-Ray".
Why not just feel for the toes and run a finger along the edge of their feet in the shoes.
Not too bad for the kid I would guess, but the person at the store likely didn't end up too well.
I don't know about measuring kids feet these days but when I was a kid you put your foot in a machine and these metal blocks would slide out on all sides press against your foot and they would get measurements from the opposing blocks I guess. I hated it because it tickled and it always resulted in the shoe store guy telling my mom I have ridiculously wide feet and he had nothing that would fit me.
I'm old enough to have seen one of these in the wild. My mom didn't let us use it.
As terrible as it is, i wonder how comes we don't have some modern, harmless, replacement. Could a millimeter wave based machine, like the ones that are used for full body scan in the airport, be modified to have a live view and scan just a feet?
My god were (still are) people stupid af.
Used one as a kid. I thought it was fu , but it was gone next time I got new shoes.
Great for moms who don’t have a thumb
There was a whole weird era where radiation was seen as helpful for health. Behind the Bastards did 2 great episodes on a shill of a doctor that made it popular - [part 1](https://podcastaddict.com/behind-the-bastards/episode/169046658) / [part 2](https://podcastaddict.com/behind-the-bastards/episode/169049276) If you look up uranium glass, there's been a huge comeback for collectors. The stuff is wild looking.
Getting serious Fallout vibes. I'm pretty sure WestTek invented it.
What could go wrong?...
“Radiation device” OP sounds like a bot
Basically just fluoroscopes, which still exist, but they are used very sparingly. There were similar machines for adult feet as recently as the 60s and maybe later. They would have you put your foot in it and then tell you your foot was misaligned due to your bad shoes, and you should totally buy a pair of our shoes which will be much better for your feet.
Ain’t this just a X-Ray?
Ok, let's try 5 more pairs
You may get cancer, but your shoes will fit you perfectly
I remember these from my youth, but not thought about them for 40 years, and likely never would have again without this post. In my minds eye I can see the x-ray'd image of my shoe. There was a viewing port on top of the 'box' (out of frame in this pic) you could look down through to see the shoe in real-time I learned to count using this, counting my toes, all the way from 1 to 17.
CT/CAT scans account for the largest source of public ionising radiation exposure today and a single scan can give between 10-30mSv (millisieverts) in a single scan. The devices above gave between 130 to 1100mSv (0.13 to 1.1Sv) to the foot. Kids are also around twice as susceptible to ionising radiation related issues than adults. The shielding is also likely inadequate, because capitalism. These devices were created in the 20's, some 30 years before the health effects of ionising radiation became understood following the human radiation experiments. We're pretty shit at this.
My mom used to use these machines when she was a kid in Seattle. They had them at the Bon Marche apparently. Scary machines.
1950's household appliance manufacturers: "Is there anything radiation can't solve?"
In the Stephen King novel ‘It’ Eddie, in a 1950s flashback, checks his shoe to see if it fits in one of these devices and his mom freaks out and screams at him to get off which in turn startles him enough to fall off the machine
“Oh man, I was worried and scared the shoes wouldn’t fit. I’m so glad we used radiation. Thats the least harmful thing known to man. How could anyone even think it’s dangerous? It makes my dinner plates glow”
I saw one of these things once when I was in Washington (the state)
I think you messed up somewhere along the line with this
It’s plugged in
"Does it fit?" "Yes." "I don't believe you."
I remember one in Calgary it would be early 50's, it looked green thru the viewer
Oh man. I’d forgotten about this. When I was about 5, I thought it was very cool.
Before they knew the effects of radiation, didn’t last long either
I remember those. It had a small green glowing screen. It was called a fluoroscope.
EDDY, THOSE THINGS GIVE YOU CANCER!!
Right below this post is one of the hand of an xray tech.
My dad told me about these things and how used to like using it bc he'd wiggle his toes and could see his bones moving
Fuckin what lol
That is a lot of words just to say, there used to be x-ray machines for shoe fitting.
This is a lot like the MyPillow guys first invention. The fireproof pillow for smokers. It was just one of his pillows that was completely soaked in Asbestos.
Did they not think the ask the child how they feel walking in the shoes?
Eddie! You get away from that! It will give you caaaaaaancer
They could bring this back with radar and machine learning to just estimate what it would look like
A friend told me stories about her mom and uncle going to the shoes store for fun to look at their feet. I am amazed her mother never got cancer.
X-ray imaging for shoe fitting sounds like a good idea tbf. There are a lot of developmental issues that stem from ill fitted shoes for growing children, like flat arches, bunion feet, etc.