Duffin and Hayter argue, however, that shoe-fitting fluoroscopy was first and foremost an elaborate marketing scheme to sell shoes. The machines were heralded as providing a more “scientific” method of fitting shoes. The devices usually had three eyepieces so that the clerk, customer, and a third curious onlooker (parent, spouse, sibling) could all view the image simultaneously. When the sales clerk flipped the switch to activate the X-ray stream, the customer could view the image on a fluorescent screen, showing the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes. The basic design included a large wooden cabinet with an X-ray tube in its base and a slot where customers would place their shoe-clad feet. Adrian, inventor of the shoe fitter shown at top, filed a patent claim in 1921, and it was granted in 1927.īefore long, two companies emerged as the leading producers of shoe-fitting fluoroscopes: the Pedoscope Co. Across the Atlantic, inventors in England applied for a British patent in 1924, which was awarded in 1926. patent in 1919, although it wasn’t granted until 1927. When the war ended, Lowe adapted the technology for shoe shops, and he filed for a U.S. Lowe, a doctor in Boston, used fluoroscopy to examine the feet of wounded soldiers without removing their boots. Hayter (both historians and medical doctors) detail in their article “Baring the Sole: The Rise and Fall of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope” ( Isis, June 2000). But Keefer stopped short of recommending that every soldier’s foot be imaged to check for fit, as Jacalyn Duffin and Charles R. In his highly regarded 1914 publication A Textbook of Military Hygiene and Sanitation, for instance, Frank Keefer included radiographs of feet in boots to highlight proper and ill-fitting footwear. From early on, feet in shoes were a popular X-ray subjectĪ push from the military during World War I helped establish the fluoroscope for shoe fitting. Morton and Hammer’s textbook became popular among surgeons, doctors, and dentists eager to apply this new technology. Among the book’s numerous illustrations was a radiograph of a woman’s foot inside a boot. Hammer, an electrical engineer, rushed to publish The X-Ray or Photography of the Invisible and Its Value in Surgery, which described the necessary apparatus and techniques to produce radiographs. Less than a year after Röntgen’s discovery, William Morton, a medical doctor, and Edwin W. Thomas Edison, an early X-ray enthusiast, coined the term fluoroscopy for this new technique, which was developed simultaneously in February 1896 in Italy and the United States.Ī popular 1896 textbook featured a radiograph of a woman’s foot inside a boot. Viewing a moving image was simpler: You just looked directly at the fluorescent screen. His first X-ray image was of his wife’s hand, distinctly showing the bones and a ring. It took a few weeks of experimenting to capture clear images on a photographic plate. Röntgen had been experimenting with cathode rays and Crookes tubes when he first saw the glow on a screen coated with barium platinocyanide. The object of interest was placed between an X-ray beam and a fluorescent screen. Scientists, engineers, and medical doctors dove into X-ray research headlong.Įxperimenters quickly realized that X-rays could produce still images, called radiographs, as well as moving images. Similar to Marie and Pierre Curie, Röntgen refused to take out any patents so that humanity could benefit from this new method for querying nature. Word also spread quickly in the popular press about this wondrous light that allowed you to see inside the human body. Three weeks after that, Science reprinted it. Röntgen published his findings on 28 December 1895, and within a month, “On a New Kind of Rays” had been translated into English and published in Nature. 8 November marks the 125th anniversary of his discovery.įrom the 1920s through the 1950s, thousands of shoe stores in North American and Europe touted their shoe-fitting fluoroscopes, which produced X-rays of customers’ feet. That name stuck for English speakers, although in many languages they’re known as Röntgen rays. Indeed, he didn’t even know what the light was, so he called it “X-rays,” the “X” standing for the unknown. When the German engineer and physicist Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovered a mysterious light that would pass through most substances and leave behind a ghostly image of an object’s interior, I doubt he had shoes in mind. How do those shoes fit? Too tight in the toes? Too wide in the heel? Step right up to the Foot-O-Scope to eliminate the guesswork and take a scientific approach to proper shoe fitting!
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