Here's Looking at You, Kids: The Fluoroscope Was a Shoe Salesman's Best Friend

By Carole Tonigan

When my brother, Butch, and I were in elementary school, my father was manager of the Sears department store in downtown Aberdeen. On Sundays when the store was closed, he frequently would take my brother and me to the store to give Mom a break. 

We always had some type of adventure exploring the store while there were no employees or customers there. In the shoe department there was an X-ray machine. 

It was about four feet high with viewers at the top and a slot at the bottom where your foot was inserted to assess the fit of your foot in a shoe. We witnessed the machine at work on customers many times during a regular business day. On some of these Sundays, we had the shoe department to ourselves while Dad was upstairs doing paperwork. 

We loved this futuristic machine. Since we could not "view" our own feet because we were not tall enough, we would take turns viewing each other's hand or foot. We thought it was such fun to wiggle our toes and fingers for the other one to see. 

I can’t recall how long the machines were at the store or whether other stores had them, but apparently it became evident later that they were not safe and our Sunday toys were removed from the store — and other shoe stores around the country. 

Oh, the things we did that we didn't know were risky at the time.

And then there were thermometers with mercury ...

Editor's Note: Following is a story in Smithsonian magazine about the kind of machines Carole is talking about.

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By Karen Larkins, Smithsonian Magazine

If you were born anywhere between 1920 and about 1950, you probably recall an odd-looking cabinet that once lured customers into shoe stores across the country. 

The shoe-fitting fluoroscope used cutting-edge technology—the x-ray—to reveal the bones and soft tissue of the foot inside the shoe, ostensibly for a better fit. For three decades beginning in the mid-1920s, millions of children and adults in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world peered into the machines for an inside view of their usually wiggling toes. 

Pedoscope

In 1986, the National Museum of American History acquired a fluoroscope, one of perhaps only a handful extant, from a shoe store in northern Ohio. The mid-1930s vintage, walnut-cabinet machine was one of thousands produced by the Adrian X-Ray Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a leading manufacturer of the devices.

From the start, the fluoroscope, invoking the authority of modern science and technology to sell more shoes, functioned more as sales gimmick than fitting aid. O. C. Hartridge, who founded the other major fluoroscope manufacturer, England’s Pedoscope Company, understood the power of this marketing ploy. The machines, he wrote in 1937, proved a "valuable ally of the retailer. By enabling him to demonstrate the correctness of his fitting, it permits him to impress customers with the reliability of his service; and in those rare instances where people insist on having shoes that are wrong, it puts the onus on them." 

Children, in particular, loved the quirky machines.

Fluoroscopes proved "as attractive and exciting to little customers as ‘free balloons and all-day suckers,’" wrote Jacalyn Duffin and Charles R.R. Hayter, in their journal article "Baring the Sole: The Rise and Fall of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope." Paul Frame, a health physicist with Oak Ridge Associated Universities, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, recalls his friends in Toronto, where he grew up, going into shoe stores just to stick their feet in the machines: "Seeing the greenish yellow image of your bones was great fun."

The device reached its peak of popularity in the early 1950s, with some 10,000 in use in shoe stores in the United States. Then, as concerns about the

potentially damaging effects of radiation grew, the machines began to disappear. (Researchers have yet to determine whether the machine was responsible for any ill effects.) Smithsonian curator Ramunas Kondratas says the fluoroscope represents "the triumph of salesmanship

over common sense and a lack of knowledge about the health consequences of certain technologies." In 1957, Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the machines. By the mid-1960s, they were history.

How do people react today when they encounter a fluoroscope? It’s mostly a matter of age. Jim Connor, a curator at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where one is on display, says that "visitors over 50 have a flashback experience as they recognize the device. These things are real memory triggers."