Shoe shop X-rays from way back

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I have a childhood memory of a time when people were a lot less careful about how they exposed themselves to dangerous radiation, particularly X-rays. Have you been to the dentist recently and had an X-ray of your teeth? Did you notice how the dentist and dental nurse left the room while the machine took its picture? Or have you had an X-ray in hospital and noticed that the radiographer hid behind a lead screen? There are good reasons for such precautions, because too much exposure to X-rays will do you no good at all. However, I well remember, as a child, going to the shoe shop for a new pair of shoes and having the fit tested by placing my feet in a machine that then took an X-ray picture. You could look down a tube to see your skeletal feet within the outline of the shoes, as could the shop assistant and your parent. If it was decided that the fit was too tight, you tried another pair and repeated the process. While your parent was at the counter buying your shoes, you ran up to the machine and had another go, as did all the other kids in the shop. It was a good game, seeing what the bones in your feet looked like! Some kids also put their hands in while their friends looked down the tube before they swapped places. Of course, because you were a child, your feet kept growing and you needed new shoes at regular intervals - so it was back down the High Street to the shoe shop for another few doses of radiation from the X-ray machine! Looking back, one has to wonder what on earth we were playing at. Whether anyone, child or adult, did contract bone cancer from these machines I do not know, but with all those poorly guarded X-rays flying round the shoe shops of Britain and America during the period up to the 1960s, it would be a wonder if some shoe fitters from that time did not succumb to the effects. Fortunately, in some respects we’ve got a bit more sense than our forebears!