THE NAKED CITY with Coffin Ed, Miss Death & Jay Katz
FEET THAT GLOW IN THE DARK!
The current crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan has rung alarm bells all around the world and is a major setback for the Australian Nuclear movement and its spokesperson Dr Zygmunt Edward “Ziggy” Switkowski. Already German chancellor Angela Merkel has shut down seven plants in Germany and the global industry is under massive scrutiny.
In 2009 a McNair poll showed that almost 50% of Australians were in favour of the construction of nuclear power plants in this country. It would be interesting to see how that figure would stand up if the same poll was taken today. Attitudes certainly change with the times and it’s interesting to look back to the late 1940s when the word “atomic” was synonymous with everything groundbreaking and technologically advanced.
If you were a school child in Sydney at the time, it’s more than likely your parents would have taken you to one of the city’s big department stores to have your new school shoes fitted. Part of the experience, and one much loved by kiddies at the time, was standing on the fluoroscope machine which provided you and both the shop assistant with a fluorescent image of the bones of your feet and the outline of your shoes. .
The whizbang machines employed a 50kv x-ray tube operating at three to eight millilamps and when you inserted your tootsies you were effectively standing on top of an x-ray tube with only a one mm thick aluminium filter to shield you. There were some protocols like a higher intensity setting for adults and a maximum exposure time but certainly no advertised warnings as to the dangers of radiation.
The machines which were manufactured by companies such as the exotically named X-ray Shoe Fitter Corporation of Milwaukee Wisconsin reached their peak of popularity in the early 50s with estimates of some fifteen thousand units placed worldwide. In the late 40’s the American Standards Association moved for a safe standard of no more than a five second exposure with children receiving no more than twelve exposures in a single year.
Whilst regulatory restrictions were observed in the US, in countries like Canada and Australia there were no such restrictions. In 1957 Pennsylvania became the first US State to ban the use of shoe fitting fluoroscopes and by the early 1960s they had all but disappeared from most US shoes stores although they continued to be used abroad.
Today there is probably a select group of baby boomers, whose parents rewarded them with numerous pairs of new shoes and whose feet truly do glow in the dark – or perhaps have fallen off all together. Whilst the nuclear power plant is unlikely to go the way of the fluoroscope it’s a timely reminder of what seems safe one day, can be a nightmare the next.
