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."
