Shoe fitting ephemera?

Here’s a new one on me .. a shoe fitting test data certificate. (all images can be clicked to enlarge)

Apparently, back in the 30′s, 40′s and 50′s, the shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores.  The purpose was to allow the salesman, the customer, and in the case of a child, the parent, to see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.  And after the fitting, a written report was given to the customer.

Unfortunately when the customer put his or her foot in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, they were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube with only a thick piece of aluminum as a filter.

While I only found one advertisement as shown here, an article I read referred to another ad that read:

Guard their foot health carefully through correctly fitted shoes. To help ensure better fit, leading shoe stores use the ADRIAN X-Ray Machine. Whether the shoe clerk is an “old timer” with 20 or more years of fitting experience or a “Saturday extra” who has been on the job only a few weeks, ADRIAN X-Ray Machines help him give your child the most accurate fitting possible.

The thing that struck me perhaps was the look of the actual fluoroscope machine.. shown here.  Apparently the customer put his or her foot into the hole on the bottom, and then looked at the foot image through the eyepieces … along with the salesman.

While this may be a bit off the overall topic of Ephemera… I found the article quite interesting.  You may want to take a look at the article yourself… by clicking here. The link is to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Oak Ridge Tennessee. They have a Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Collection and this is just one of the items in the collection.

For those of you who are newspaper Ephemera junkies, you’ll surely be interested in this Volume 1 Number 1 – 1904 edition of LeRadium, the first scientific journal devoted to radioactivity and related subjects.  The cover photograph features the three co-discoveror’s of the element radium, from left to right: Gustave Bemont, Pierre Curie and Marie Curie.  The reference article says that in 2002, another copy of the same issue sold for $2,868 at a Christies’ auction.

So for our general Ephemera fans and for our newspaper Ephemera fans, a trip over to Oak Ridge’s museum may be a worthwhile trip.

I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the encore it deserves.

Tom
Click to see my current Bonanzle items

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