Finding the right fit for your shoes is not that difficult.
All you oughta do is take a short walk through the store in the new pair.
They were also a nice sales gimmick.
Front and side view of a Shoe Fitting Fluoroscope.
A typical viewing lasting about 20 seconds deliveredhalf the amountof radiation a CT-scan of the chest did.
Because many of the machines were poorly maintained, some of them delivered potentially hazardous doses.
Particularly bad ones were found to deliver three hundred times the permissible limit.
Even those seating in the waiting rooms were irradiated with radiation.
On inquiring, the doctors learned that the woman had been working in a shoe shop for ten years.
Seven years later he was granted a US patent for the unit.
At around the same time, a similar machine was patented in Britain; this was called the Pedoscope.
An X-ray fluoroscope, manufactured by Watson Victor Ltd., Australia & New Zealand, 1950.
Photo credit:MAAS
It was no secret that x-rays were harmful.
However, there was not enough data to quantify the level of risk.
Subsequent surveys across forty states of the United States found 75 percent of the machines to be unsafe.
The first warnings were issued in 1950, and machines were began to be pulled from the stores.
But it would take another three decades before the last of these machines were put out of service.
