Shoe Stores Decided To Use Radiation Machines For Customers’ Feet… Instead of Letting Them Try On Shoes
To find out if a shoe fits one’s foot is pretty straightforward. Put on the shoes, then walk up and down the store aisle for a bit to see how they feel. However, back in the 1920s-70s, things were different in many shoe stores across America and Europe. For half a century, many shoe stores overthought the simple concept of trying on shoes, and got overly fancy and science-y with it. Rather than stick to the tried and true practice of just letting people try on shoes, shoe stores decided to use radiation machines to blast their customers’ feet with unshielded X-rays. It began in the 1920s, when Dr. Jacob Lowe demonstrated a modified medical device at shoe retailer conventions in Boston and Milwaukee, that X-rayed people’s feet.
Other inventors had the same idea, and came up with similar devices. Known as Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscopes, and also sold under the names X-Ray Shoe Fitters, Foot-O-Scopes, and Pedoscopes, the devices were metal constructions covered in wood, about four feet high. Installed in shoe stores, customers would don a pair of shoes in which they were interested, stick their feet into the device while standing, then look down through a porthole at an X-ray view of their feet in the shoes. The bones and the shoe outline were clearly visible. A pair of other viewing portholes on the machine’s sides allowed the shoe salesman and anybody else with the customer to look at wiggling toes, to get an idea of how much space there was in the shoes. Needless to say, that was one technology that backfired.