When X-Rays were used at the Shoe Store

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/when-xrays-were-all-the-rage-a-trip-to-the-shoe-store-was-dangerously-illuminating

by Gaishan • 6 years ago

116 117 6 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

shotta• 6 years ago

Shoe-fitting fluoroscope... there’s a massive shoe store near where I grew up that still has at least one (not operational). Very cool antique.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

The old shoe store in my small town had one in the corner. My Dad asked about it. The clerk said it was dangerous and didn't want to use it. We kids were disappointed.

That was post WWII, so I don't know how long it'd been there. The fluoroscope I mean; the shoe store had been there for decades.

elric• 6 years ago

Tangent. People are still getting conned when it comes to shoes. Custom designed soles, with padding in the "right" places based on the shape of your foot, in order to "absorb impact" or "correct overpronation". Which is nonsense and unnecessary unless you have foot deformities. Your foot is perfectly capable of absorbing impact and whatnot. This is all marketing aimed at gullible new runners who want to go from couch to marathon without taking the time to learn proper running technique and without giving their bodies time to adapt to running. All the while ingraining and reinforcing bad running habits. But at least we're no longer xraying people's feet for no apparent reason, so that's a start.

eganist• 6 years ago

I'd be interested in reading deeper. Do you have references countering the marketing claims?

thesumofall• 6 years ago

One of the best resources in the net. It won’t give clear cut answers but plenty of good starters to make up your own mind: https://fellrnr.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Running_Shoes

cbanek• 6 years ago

I don't remember where I saw this, but I thought I saw a display that you could step on and it would try to convince you to buy custom designed insoles? It used some kind of pressure sensor that would map your foot or something.

I feel like shoes are kind of like mattresses are marketed the same way - mostly talking about pressure points, that and memory foam.

3JPLW2• 6 years ago

The proper shoe shouldn't reinforce bad running habits. If you got pushed that way by a one-on-one shoe fitting, you certainly did get "conned."

As someone who has had only one professional running shoe fitting in my life, I found it invaluable. They were able to immediately identify where my stride was going wrong. They advised me not just on the shoe, but on improving my gait. I bought one full-price shoe once, then was able to buy similar shoes on sale/clearance. Following the fitting (and guidance), I've not had the same knee pain since.

YMMV, but it's not all cons. It's a middle-ground between nothing and a full-fledged sports therapy.

amanaplanacanal3• 6 years ago

Exactly. People ran barefoot, then with a thin piece of leather strapped to their feet for hundreds of thousands of years. All this arch and ankle support of the last few decades has done nothing except cause injuries.

dantillberg• 6 years ago

What about all the concrete and asphalt we run on now? Doesn't that make a difference?

nkrisc2• 6 years ago

And people also only lived to be 40 (if they were lucky) for hundreds of thousands of years. Just because ancient people did something doesn't somehow make it better for that reason alone.

rootusrootus2• 6 years ago

I've had foot problems for a while, and I went to a podiatrist who suggested I wear crocs. Said that shoes were a modern creation and that our feet weren't designed to need them.

It was an unmitigated disaster. So I went to a different podiatrist. She said "let me guess, you went to Dr. So-and-so?" and I replied yes, she said "Yeah, I don't agree with him. Shoes are modern, but so are floors."

My feet are much happier now. Properly designed insoles make pretty much any shoe comfortable for me (notably, the insoles aren't really padded, they're pretty hard). Walking around on hardwood floors barefoot makes my feet hurt.

HeWhoLurksLate• 6 years ago

I put running insoles in a pair of really cheap steel-toes that I have to wear at work, and it made all the difference in how my legs and feet felt at the end of a shift.

benesch• 6 years ago

I’ve never understood the argument that floors and pavement are the cause of modern foot problems due to their hardness. It just doesn’t add up.

Sure, running barefoot through a well-maintained soccer field is going to be lower impact than running on pavement. But ancient humans didn’t evolve on soccer fields.

If you ever try running through unmaintained land barefoot, it’s terrible on your feet! Uneven terrain, branches and rocks everywhere... you wind up putting a ton of stress on your feet, far more than you do walking around a house barefoot.

I think it’s far more likely that a) modern life causes children not to develop strong feet from an early age, or b) that evolutionary pressures for well-functioning feet have disappeared.

In any case, I’m glad the insoles solved your problems. I just wish the field of podiatry did a better job of root cause analysis.

fiftyacorn• 6 years ago

I've stuck with one type of running shoe all the way thru running. I just get the new version each time, and when I have changed style or brand I've got injured

blevin• 6 years ago

A good pod episode on this:

https://peterattiamd.com/irenedavis/

foobiekr2• 6 years ago

I agree with this. Due to youthful stupidity I've probably had at least a dozen severe sprains and so I am now very prone to them (rolling an ankle at least once a year until I made a change). I switched to five fingers, which I acknowledge are full of hype and woo on the marketing side, and have never rolled an ankle since. It's been 13 years or so..

k__• 6 years ago

An older friend of mine told me the times were surreal. Doctors would casualy xray you for many minutes even when you got minor symptoms.

Then suddendly xray was considered harmful and you would only get on static image when you had serious problems.

teleforce• 6 years ago

Now we know how Dijkstra's paper editor come out with the infamous phrase "considered harmful" :-)

andybak• 6 years ago

I'm 49 and I'm sure I remember there still being machines in stores when I was 7 or 8. Is that possible? I don't recall them actually in use - but they were visibly present.

(I'm in the UK)

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope#Regul...

Looks possible.

flarg• 6 years ago

Yes I also recall seeing them in Clarks but unused

snalty• 6 years ago

I remember seeing and using the one from 1996 in my early childhood as displayed in this article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32738088#_=_

Not sure if these actually used X-rays but it'd be interesting to find out if they did.

EDIT: In hindsight, I really don't think the type I remember used X-rays.

ANOTHER EDIT: Looks like this is the company that made the ones I can remember: http://sensatech.com/applications/index.html

wrycoder• 6 years ago

There was one in a store we used to visit in the late ‘40s. It wasn’t a shoe store - more of a small department store.

I’d stand on the thing, stick the fronts of my shoes into the two holes, lean over and look through the viewport (which was rather like an old stereopticon), push the button and wiggle my green toes.

The clerks never bothered me. I think I knew enough to keep the time short. I don’t remember if it had a timeout - it probably did.

Digory• 6 years ago

An older relative’s oncologist told him these machines were probably behind an increase in thyroid cancers of kids from the 50s.

Hard to prove the causation decades later, but that was the working assumption.

zimpenfish• 6 years ago

Same age, also UK, and yeah, they were still doing those when I was at school - definitely had at least one, vague memories of two.

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 years ago

It's possible. I'm older and I remember seeing my foot bones outlined in a very attractive green through one. These machines weren't rare items.

I wasn't old enough to understand the dangers, and of course most parents didn't understand them either.

It was all rather insane and reckless, and only luck rather than judgement kept them from becoming a major public health issue.

crtasm• 6 years ago

My sister was x-rayed in the UK circa 1987, something to do with her feet being wider than the norm.

detritus2• 6 years ago

I'm glad you asked as I'm only a few years younger than you and I have a distinct memory of these too - perhaps in Clarks stores? Must've been, for me anyway, up until around 1985, but that seems so late given how long at that point they'd been deemed dangerous?

pbhjpbhj• 6 years ago

I wonder if you and/or others might be confusing the x-ray machines with the mechanical foot measuring machines.

I'm middle aged and remember Clarks (probably in Sheffield, UK) having what looked like a crushing machine with steel plates that closed - very gently - on to the feet and gave a read out of size and width. (See image at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32738088#_=_ under "Appropriate measures", left hand machine seems familiar to me).

I remember it being a very strange but pleasant experience and wonder now if it wasn't my first ASMR.

noneeeed• 6 years ago

So glad I'm not the only one :) there was something weirdly nice about having your foot in one of those machines. Perhaps it was just the effect of going from a hot, probably somewhat uncomfortable show, to the cold metal and freedom.

hilbert42• 6 years ago

Well the ones I saw at that age definitely were the xray type. However they weren't being used when I tried to get measured.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

My father is approximately 60 and has told me about messing with these things as a kid in Edinburgh.

ggm• 6 years ago

I am approximately 60 and as a child, I used one of these in south clerk st, Edinburgh when I bought shoes.

I am not your father.

amelius• 6 years ago

So what could we use as a solution nowadays? UWB radar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband

alricb• 6 years ago

A Brannock device? (essentially calipers for feet) https://brannock.com/

opwieurposiu• 6 years ago

My daughter has a pair of toddler shoes with a window in the sole so you can see where the toes are. It works, but I am not convinced it is necessary. You can tell pretty quick if the shoes do not fit by watching the kid try to walk.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/76/0f/ac/760fac925593ed258c93...

rob74• 6 years ago

Interesting and also scary - I guess it was ok for customers, but the employees using the machines would probably over time get a serious amount of radiation literally in their face (from what it looks like)? If you think that nowadays while making X-rays the medical personnel will either wear lead-lined aprons or leave the room altogether...

3JPLW2• 6 years ago

Especially given this:

That 1948 study of 43 machines in Detroit showed ranges from 16 to 75 roentgens per minute. In 1946, the American Standards Association had issued a safety code for industrial use of X-rays, limiting exposure to 0.1 R per day.

I'd be curious how much a typical modern dental x-ray emits, but we no longer measure in roentgens these days as we have better measures of the actual dose (sieverts).

quickthrowman• 6 years ago

Radiation from x-rays is measured in microsieverts, or less than a single day’s exposure to background radiation

https://www.iaea.org/resources/rpop/health-professionals/den...

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 years ago

Modern dental x-rays are basically negligible for most patients, although not for dentists who do them daily, even though they're well away from the beam - which is why they have to hide when they take them.

Less negligible are CT scans, which can expose you to multiples of the average annual background dose in a few minutes.

That's still relatively low level exposure. But there isn't really a safe minimum exposure level, and it's certainly not something you'd want to have regularly.

adenner• 6 years ago

With some hand waving 100 roentgens is equal to 1 sievert

joezydeco2• 6 years ago

My dad worked in a shoe store when he was in high school. His friends would goof around with the machine during slow periods. Thankfully my dad stayed away from the thing.

Many lost feet or parts of them, never making a connection back to the fluoroscope. Nobody knew how much radiation those things were actually putting out.

(Ironically or not, I now work in medical physics where even the slightest exposure gets noted and tracked)

deepspace• 6 years ago

Wait a minute - so you are saying that having parts of your foot fall off was just considered part of the normal high school experience? Does not sound right to me - surely a rash of radiation burns among teenagers would have been noticed, even in those days.

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

Say, why can’t we recreate this with ultrasound?

Actually that seems like a good idea. Should I patent it?

skj• 6 years ago

Would require taking your shoes and socks off, smothering them in sonic gel, and having someone who knows how operate the wand.

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

I’m not sure about that. I’d imagine for a general outline of the foot with little need for detail it might be fine.

poisonarena• 6 years ago

some people would pay to work a job like that

gwbas1c• 6 years ago

Now you can't, because someone will use your post to invalidate it as prior art!

mrfusion3• 6 years ago

Oops

mordechai90002• 6 years ago

I think you could build a 3d model with photogrammetry. There's not that much soft tissue and it's not like you're going to ignore it, anyway. Retool the manufacturing so custom shoes roll off the line with modern materials and design.

I'd pay a premium for hiking boots custom made for my feet, and I bet a lot of other people would, too. Or any athletic footwear. People are already paying whatever they can afford.

Of course you can get custom hiking boots handmade, but when I looked into it, the materials and design were ancient and the resulting boots were ridiculously heavy.

Analemma_• 6 years ago

This is already a thing: my usual running shoe store went out of business because of Covid, and the new one I went to has a machine that scans your feet and builds a 3D model. Like flouroscopy, I suspect it's mostly a gimmick: the shoes I ended up getting there are fine but don't seem to be appreciably better than the ones I would get at the store which measured my feet the old-fashioned way.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

Stephen King's It features one of these machines, in the 1958 part.

It's a shame, really. I was thinking about these machines recently as I was trying to come up with a method to drill through a soft and opaque material -- how would you know you were properly centered? Gosh, one of these would be handy.

jononor• 6 years ago

Unsure what material you need to drill. But for some soft materials the solution can be quite simple - freeze it to make it hard!

GnarfGnarf• 6 years ago

I remember having my shoe fit checked in the 50's by one of these machines, at Morgan's department store in Montreal.

cjm42• 6 years ago

There was an episode of American Restoration that featured a machine like this. They restored it (minus the X-ray part) with a stock X-ray picture so it would look like it still worked.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2348752/

phkahler• 6 years ago

Next time you need an X-ray ask the doctor why that costs more than a pair of shoes. I mean they used to include one free with a pair.

knodi123• 6 years ago

because the shoe salesman isn't a trained radiologist.

bigbubba4• 6 years ago

Aren't the two distinguished in the billing? And AFAIK you can get 'just an xray' from one provider then contract another radiologist for the analysis.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

A fluoroscopic image is very low resolution compared to an actual film (then), or DICOM (now).

The views taken are done to show particular things and the person doing it needs training. Then the reporting needs paying for, and radiologists aren’t cheap. The images and paperwork (referral, report, images, billing and demographics) need storing and need to have a system for finding them again.

The department needs things for cleaning your blood off the floor, handling you trying to die while on site and generally working safely.

And lastly, everyone clips the ticket, insurance primarily.

But I mostly like your take, it’s great.

ineedasername3• 6 years ago

Many things would be much cheaper if all safety protocols were removed. Cars are a great example: Safety features may add around $2k annually [0], though they've helped prevent a few hundred thousand deaths since 1980 roughly cutting in half the per-capita automobile fatalities. As it is, they cost about $44 billion annually [2] which means in addition to lives saved, the reduction in deaths save us up to $44 billion/year. (probably not all attributed to safety features given the reduction in drunk driving.)

Considering the $2k cost and roughly 5 million cars sold each year, the safety measures cost $10 billion, for an ROI of up to $30 billion/year.

There was an unfortunate uptick as smart phones gained popularity, though it seems like public awareness campaigns and distracted driving laws may have helped that.

Car safety is a pretty good example of how both government regulation and the free market can work together to achieve positive results. (marketing based on safety features allowed companies to compete on something other than price).

That's not an endorsement to embrace all government regulation, just an example of how it isn't all meaningless bureaucracy.

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/winnablebattles/report/motor.html

jacobwilliamroy2• 6 years ago

Car safety is an example of government regulation. Full stop. No free market anything involved. If the market was free, then it wouldn't be regulated. You're doublespeak-ing.

simonh• 6 years ago

Michael Caine (as Harry Palmer) using a shoe shop X-Ray machine to examine a suspicious package. It's at the end of this clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPlOsrT0raQ

hammock2• 6 years ago

"When mm waves were used at the airport (2044)"

BenjiWiebe• 6 years ago

mm waves are lower energy than visible light, which is far lower energy than x-rays. Or perhaps you weren't implying that mm waves are ionizing and cause cancer?

kube-system4• 6 years ago

Cancer via ionization is not the only damage that can be imparted on to human cells.

It is quite plausible that we will discover new things that are dangerous in the future (to varying degrees), as we once did with x-rays.

anonymousiam• 6 years ago

As a child, my mother would go to the shoe store and stare into these machines for hours, just for the entertainment value. Later in life, her feet were horribly deformed.

gxqoz• 6 years ago

A related phenomenon was x-ray salons, "the most scientific way to remove hair." Hundreds of these cropped up in the early 20th century, originally growing out of their use in the medical profession. Most targeted working class, immigrant women to the US. They were eventually banned but persisted underground for quite some time.

There's a good history of them in Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. https://books.google.com/books?id=LZvsCwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

Causality1• 6 years ago

Those machines were terrible but you have to be a little wistful for the days when the American public actually liked science and liked products associated with it.

outworlder• 6 years ago

One could argue that the disdain for science today could also be related to this kind of thing.

fennecfoxen2• 6 years ago

You do need to understand that there was a point in history when Science™ and Progress™ turned into the things that brought us world wars and atomic bombs.

yostrovs• 6 years ago

Many doctors stand for hours with their hands under the fluoroscope when working in the cath lab. It's not that dangerous if they're willing to do it.

tobias2014• 6 years ago

And after getting a new pair of shoes, you brush your teeth with radioactive toothpaste!

"Its radioactive radiation increases the defenses of teeth and gums. The cells are loaded with new life energy, the bacteria are hindered in their destroying effect. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/toothpaste.ht...

TrinaryWorksToo• 6 years ago

Kills the bacteria and the patient too!

MurMan• 6 years ago

I remember these machines well. My father was a radiologist and wouldn't let us use them. He knew they were dangerous and the shoe sales people were unqualified.

As a side note, many of his fellow radiologists lost fingers because they didn't follow procedures using shields and lead gloves.

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

I found one of these units at an antique store in Maine, sadly the x-ray tube had been removed. Really nice cabinetry though and I thought this would make an awesome steampunk type accent to a workspace at some point.

And while this particular idea had its flaws, the idea of looking at a foot inside a shoe is fundamentally a good one in my opinion. Feet are pretty variable between people and the difference between having the right shoe and the wrong shoe is a good differentiator. I didn't appreciate how much until I got a pair of hiking boots (Asolo) that actually fit my particularly shaped foot. My father-in-law had custom shoes made for him on Hong Kong in the 60's and would send them a check when ever he wanted a new pair.

So startup idea is to use some sort of nuclear imaging technology that has no negative health effects to enhance shoe fitting and thus sales.

schoen• 6 years ago

My dentist has been telling me that digital x-rays have a dramatically lower dose than the old film kind (which I used to get as a child). I don't know how much lower is dramatically lower, but I think it might be orders of magnitude.

Maybe for what you want to see on the shoes you could use an even lower dose than the new dental x-rays. I mean, these old shoe store x-rays were trying to make the image directly visible to human eyes with a fluoroscope or something, right? Isn't that going to be orders of magnitude more radiation than modern sensors that aren't using the energy from the x-ray radiation to actually render the image?

dmurray• 6 years ago

I think you're right. According to [0], and why would you need any other source for such things, a modern chest X-ray is about 20 µSv. Your two feet combined are smaller than your chest, and in a safer place for radiation, but let's call it the same conservatively.

From the same source, a 4,000-km cross-country flight is 40 µSv. We allow airline workers and other business travellers to rack up a couple of hundred of those a year without worrying too much, so it should be safe to try on at least dozens of pairs of shoes per year.

In practice, we'd surely demand too much regulatory burden for this tech to ever make it back to shoe stores. If shoe salesmen have to be as qualified, regulated and insured as radiologists, it would be cheaper to make custom shoes.

[0] https://xkcd.com/radiation/

technofiend• 6 years ago

The early 20th century had an odd fascination with all things radioactive. I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article entitled "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off" [1]. I can't find a WSJ reprint, but there are online copies available by searching the headline or a CNN article mentions it. [2]

Apparently Mr. Byers the maker and an avid drinker of the cola had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin. According to The New York Times [3], Mr. Byers' death triggered action from the FDA and brought an end to radioactive patent medicines.

From the CNN article:

Evans was an expert at measuring and mathematically modeling the human body's uptake and excretion of radioactivity. Based on Byers' self-reported RadiThor consumption, Evans' model had predicted that Byers' body would contain about 100,000 becquerel of radioactivity. ("Becquerel" is an international unit of radioactivity.) What he found was that Byers' skeletal remains actually had a total of 225,000 becquerel, suggesting that either Evans' model of radiation uptake was underestimating radium's affinity for bone, or alternatively, that Byers had actually understated his personal RadiThor consumption by a factor of at least two. It was not possible to determine which alternative accounted for the discrepancy.

For the sake of comparison, some water from the Fukushima disaster reads 200,000 becquerel, although different isotopes are involved and exposure limits vary by isotope, Mr. Byers was well beyond a reasonable limit by any measure. [4]

[1] http://lateralscience.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-radium-water-...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/health/energy-drinks-radioact...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1932/04/02/archives/death-stirs-acti...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/water-6-700-times-more-ra...

theophrastus• 6 years ago

My 89 year old mother loves to tell the story of her brother and friends spending several hours getting whatever body part they could push through the shoe slot below to be reported on how it looks by another child looking through the scope at the top. They were very disappointed that my uncle's head couldn't fit so they could examine his brain, (which they always figured had some bats in it)

islon• 6 years ago

Every time I read about such things I imagine what kind of things are we doing now that people 50-100 years from now will comment and laugh about.

When X-Rays were used at the Shoe Store

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