Today’s #Fieldtripfriday takes us to the shoe fitting Fluoroscope in the Nuclear Medicine exhibition area of the Museum. The fluoroscope, invented by M.B. Adrian & Sons, was advertised as the “scientific” way for a shoe salesperson to see if a shoe fit. It contained a 50 kv X-ray tube and a push button timer that could be set from 5 to 45 seconds. When the child or adult placed their feet in the opening, the two viewing portholes enabled the salesperson to see the toes inside the shoe. The bones

Why Did Kids Put Their Feet in X-Ray Machines? The shoe-fitting fluoroscope, also known as a pedoscope, was an X-ray fluoroscope machine commonly installed in shoe stores from the 1920s until about the 1970s. It allowed customers, especially children, to view the bones of their feet inside shoes in real time, helping assess whether the shoes fit properly. Marketed as a modern, scientific tool for better shoe fitting, it became a popular feature in stores across Europe and North America. However,

This is a deleted scene from my visit to Creative Electron. They had a super cool little museum at their office filled with vintage X-ray machines, including this machine, called a shoe-fitting fluorscope, that used to be common at shoe stores to show you whether your shoes fit properly or not. They became outlawed starting in the 1950s because of the health effects of massive doses of ongoing radiation that shoe salesmen were suffering from. More on wikipedia if you're curious: https://en.wikip