Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? This morning I was thinking, as I often do, about artificial intelligence and how quickly various people and companies are rushing to apply AI to just about everything. And this isn't exactly new. It would be naive and reductive to say it. We're so Researchers have been developing AI for decades, with a focus on different aspects of AI throughout the ages generative AI, while splashy is really just one of the more recent implementations that have has caught our attention. So while we can't say that AI has exactly crept up on us, the push to make use of AI, when one could argue we don't even have a full appreciation for what it can do, both in good and bad scenarios, means that we're being a little premature. And this actually reminds me of shoe stores. Now that's a pretty big leap, but I promise I'm going somewhere. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase history repeats itself, or maybe the slightly more florid version. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, once upon a time there was an era in which people made use of a powerful technology for a trivial purpose, and many people potentially paid the price for that decision. This is just one example. Obviously, there are lots of others, some of which are famous enough to have had entire documentaries made about their stories. But I am talking about when shoe salespeople were regularly irradiated as part of their job. Okay, so let's set the scene, and it's the last decade of the nineteenth century, eighteen ninety five in fact, and a German smarty pants by the name of Wilhelm Konrad Runtgen was working as the director of the Physical Institute at the University of Fursburg. Now I don't mean he was working at a physical school and other people were, I don't know, working in some sort of philosophically hypothetical school that would be putting discartes before the horse. Rather, I mean Runtgen specialized in physics. In the eighteen nineties, he was experimenting with a fairly new technology. What essentially was a cathode ray tube or CRT. This is the technology that would later be responsible for producing images in old television sets, the big, boxy kind that you might remember from decades ago. Runtgn was studying how high voltage electricity could pass through low vacuum tubes, like essentially a cathode ray tube. Now, the story goes that one day he was shutting things down for the evening in his lab and he noticed something peculiar. So he had covered the cathode tube with a piece of black cardboard, and when he powered up the tube and turned off the light, he saw that there was something glowing in his lab. So he investigates and he discovers the glowing is coming from a piece of paper that has a coating of barium platinu cyanide on it, and that this is what was glowing in the dark, and it was several feet away from the tube, which again was covered by black cardboard. It was far enough away from the tube that Runkan thought the tube would not be able to illuminate this particular piece of paper. Moreover, there was some sort of energy outside of visible light happening here, something that could stimulate the barium platinus cyanide to fluoresce and something that could pass through this black cardboard. Now, Runkan was a methodical sort, and he repeated this somewhat accidental experiment many times to make certain that what he was seeing was actually real, that there was something to it. He further investigated the phenomena for weeks before deciding to publish any papers or even discuss the matter with anyone else. He knew that lots of other people were doing experiments with these low vacuum tubes, so he didn't want to tip his hand too early and perhaps lose out on snag a really big scientific discovery. Turns out, this was a really good idea because there were no shortage of people who were absolutely certain they had discovered something new and exciting, and then after other people looked into it, they found out that there wasn't really any discovery there at all, which could be pretty humiliating, but this was not the case with Rutgin. He had made the first documented observation of what we would call X rays, in fact, what he would call X rays X rays because X represents an unknown variable. What's more, Runkin noticed something really darn cool. So let's say that he hung up a sheet of paper that had a coating of barium platino cyanide on it, and he put that a few feet away from the tube, and then he energizes the tube, he turns it on. Essentially, if he put his hand between the tube, which was serving as a lamp and the sheet of paper, then on the sheet of paper he would see projected the bones of his hand. It was as though he could see straight through his flesh and look at the skeleton inside. Clearly, he couldn't just keep this a secret, so he had to tell his closest friend. He brought his wife to his lab and showed her the discovery. He had her hold her hand against a sheet of this paper, and then he exposed her hand for a fifteen minute long X ray exposure, and instead of it just projecting the images of the bones on the sheet of paper, it actually made a record of it, an image like a photograph, the first radiograph known on record. She reportedly exclaimed, I have seen my own death, meaning she had seen her own skeleton. Those the Rengins really knew how to turn up the romance. It tells you anyway, after weeks of investigative work, Jen reached a point where he felt confident in coming forward to his peers to present his findings, and once he did, it caught on like a house on fire. His paper published at the end of eighteen ninety five in December of eighteen ninety five. By eighteen ninety six, people were making practical use of X rays. Mostly this was in the medical field, but not exclusively, because suddenly it was possible for physicians to gaze into the human body, you know, looking into a patient without first having to make an opening, which, as you can imagine, presents certain advantages. All right, but now it's time to jump to a different smarty pants, someone who was quite the opportunistic smarty pants. In fact, some people could argue that the true smarty pants nature of this man is that he found new ways to claim authorship over work that really just happened within him his place of business. I am talking about Thomas Edison. Now, whether you think of Edison as a truly brilliant inventor responsible for inventing countless things in his lifetime, or you think of him as someone who was more likely to employ people who did most of the actual inventing, and then he would put his names on the patents. I'll leave all that to you. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle. But the important part of our story is that Edison and his staff were working on a technology that would leverage X rays in a really interesting way. So the basic concept wasn't that different from what Reunjin had been experimenting with in his lab. The invention would have a screen that would be coded with some sort of fluorescent material on it and would thus fluoresce when exposed to X rays. There would also be a lamp capable of generating those X rays, and if you were to place something between the lamp and the screen, you would be able to see the stuff that blocked X rays from hitting the screen. Now, your flesh would let X rays pass right through it, so you would see your bones on the fluorescent screen behind, and you can have the lamp on, you can move your hand back and forth, and you can watch the bones in your hands move in real time. Edison called his invention the vitascope, and I'm pretty sure later on he thought that was a really ironic name, a poor name for him to pick for this invention because vita means life, you can see that in words like vitality. But the vitoscope would actually lead to the death of one of Edison's most loyal members of staff. That person was Clarence Madison Dally. He, like his father and his brothers, would work as a glassblower for T. Thomas Edison. Dally worked closely with Edison while trying to design a practical incandescent lamp. Again, Essen didn't really invent the light bulb, but in his lab the light bulb was turned into something that was actually of practical use. Now, upon runk Jen's discovery of X rays, Dali would actually shift his own work to focus on creating X ray lamps as well as a fluorescent sheet that actually used calcium tungue state as the fluorescing material instead of the barium platinum cyanide. This was seen to produce sharper images and thus a higher fidelity kind of image. For years, Dali worked in the lab developing this technology, perfecting it, and over time he began to experience some pretty not just pretty, some truly serious health problems. His hands showed signs of radiation burns, particularly his left hand, which he used to demonstrate the X rays by waving it in the path of the X rays. He began to develop skin lesions, which are part of you know, radiation burns. His problems progressed to the point that he actually had to have his left hand amputated, but that was only the beginning. Later on he had to have more of his left arm amputated, then several of the fingers on his right hand, and then ultimately he had one arm amputated to the elbow and the other arm amputated to the shoulder. But the damage was even more severe, and in nineteen oh four, when he was not even forty years old, Dally passed away from terminal cancer. This experience hit Edison very, very hard. He truly liked Dali, and it also convinced him that X ray technology was far more dangerous than beneficial, and he was quoted to say, don't talk to me about x I am afraid of them. But Edison's team had already invented the fluoroscope at that point, and there were all sorts of potential applications for that technology. When we come back, I'll talk about some of those, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, before the break, I mentioned that Edison's fluoroscope would end up having various applications, So the most obvious ones were in medicine, right, and there was a darn good reason to lean heavily on medicine in the early twentieth century. You had a real provocative reason why you wanted to advance the science of medicine. Several million reasons, as it turned out, because in July nineteen fourteen, World War One began. Of course, back then we didn't call it World War one because being optimistic anyway. One of the big challenges presented by the World War involved making sure soldiers had the right equipment, and that included a good pair of boots. Soldiers could end up having terrible injuries. If they weren't wearing the right boots. They wouldn't be able to march as far. They could suffer from things like trench foot, So they needed to make sure the boots were as well made and as good a fit as was practical for the purposes of mass producing them for soldiers. This is a delicate thing to balance, so the thought was we should make sure that soldiers had boots that would give them the support they needed and not create a source of distraction or injury. And so a guy named Frank Keefer created a book that he titled a Textbook of Military Hygiene and Sanitation. This was all with the goal of trying to keep soldiers as healthy as possible before they were forced to march out in front of a German machine gun in this time. Next book, Kiefer included X ray images also known as radiographs, in order to show how a soldier's foot should fit inside a boot and what it would look like if the soldier were wearing the wrong size boot. So this was really just to illustrate the importance of matching the size to the soldier. Keifer was not suggesting that the army invest in thousands of fluoroscopes and check each recruit individually. This was just to demonstrate the importance of a good fit, but his idea sparked other ideas. A doctor named Jacob J. Lowe used a fluoroscope to examine wounded soldier's feet without having to first take off their boots. And you can definitely understand how that could be a really useful thing to do. You know why, would you potentially make an injury worse or perhaps even create a new injury if you can get a look in a non invasive kind of way, and it works so well that Low thought it would make sense to bring the technology to pediatrists and to shoe stores in general. Why just use this on soldiers when you could have a fluoroscope in your local shoe shop, Customers could try on a pair of new shoes. They could step up to the fluoroscope, the staff could check to make sure that the shoes were actually a really good fit. Maybe they could even employ someone who could take a look at those images and say, oh, you know what, you need special shoes because otherwise you're not going to get the support you need and your feet are going to hurt. Right, You could actually employ people who could be experts in this. They could be like the equivalent of a foot doctor working in a shoe store and practice preventive medicine. It would be incredible. So Low files for a patent in nineteen nineteen for a shoe store version of this technology. However, it would take nearly a decade for the patent off to grant a patent. He called it the foot of scope, and I am not making a joke about that. That is actually what it would be called. And yeah, the idea is that the customer would stick their feet into this machine I'll describe it in a second, and the shoe store salesperson would be able to look through a visor and determine if the shoe was a good fit or not. Low was not the only person pursuing this dream, believe it or not. There were others around the world who were filing similar patents. And while they filed their patents after Low had already submitted his to the US Patent Office, and at least a couple of cases, they got their patents first. So kind of shows the great injustice of global commerce, right, But eventually it all shook out that really there were two major companies that would use this technology to create machines for shoe shops. So in England you had a company called the Petoscope Company, and here in the United States you had the X Ray Shoe Fitter Incorporated. Now, these fluoroscopes looked a lot like a tall wooden cabinet, maybe like a little bit higher than waist tall. So the customer would approach the cabinet on one side, and the customer would be standing up and they would step up onto a step at the base of the cabinet, and at that point in the cabinet's wall there was kind of a little alcove where they could slide their feet into this thing, so it's inside the cabinet, So you're standing on the step, your feet are now inside the cabinet. On the inside of the cabinet, the X ray lamp would actually be below the customer's feet, pointing up at a fluorescent screen, and the fluorescent screen would be above the customer's feet, so the lamp would blast X rays up through the shoes, through the flesh of the customer's feet, and would leave a moving image of dim bones on the fluorescent screen, which staff could view from above. So on the opposite side of the cabinet were the controls that the staff would use, so pretty simple stuff. They would have, you know, like a switch to turn the fluoroscope on, and at that point they would start powering up the cathode ray tube and start beaming X rays toward the fluorescent screen. There would be at least one, but usually several viewing ports that would look down from the top of the cabinet into the cabinet itself. Now, these ports remind me a little bit of like a submarine periscope, you know, has kind of like a visor kind of of attachment that fits around the eyes, which of course obviously blocks out the ambient light of the shop while you're looking at the tootsis inside the cabinet. And the multiple visors meant more than one per and could look at a time. So maybe it's the shoe salesperson, maybe they have an assistant, and there's probably some curious lookilu who wants to take a look that skeleton bones. In fact, I'm sure there was no shortage of variations of the phrase oh honey, I can see your skeleton feet and these shoe shops at the time. Anyway, the idea was the shoe salesperson would be able to study the feet inside the shoe and determine if the shoe really was a good fit. Though I'm sure in many, perhaps most cases, the real use of the technology was that it attracted customers and it helped move sales. Sure, I bet in some cases the clerk might say, this pair of shoes looks like it's on the small side. For you or maybe you need a wider pair of shoes or something along those lines. But most of the time, I bet it was really just a way to get folks into the door. Now, as I'm sure you've all gathered, this practice was also extremely dangerous. Customers might get a large dose of X rays, a larger one than they would in a normal year, especially these days. But the real risk was for the staff who were using these machines over and over on multiple customers a day. The first of these machines hit the market in nineteen twenty seven, we wouldn't even settle on a standard unit of measurement for radiation, the run Gin, named after the guy who discovered X rays. We wouldn't decide on that till nineteen twenty eight the following year, and we still didn't have that much data to draw conclusions as to how much or how little radiation exposure was really safe or harmful. Now you had some scientists who were arguing that it would be a really bad idea to make use of radiation technology in an environment like a shoe store, that it represented a true risk to employees, that radiation really was no joke. Then you had, on the other side the owners of the stores, who essentially said shut up. The stores were claiming that the X rays would let them create real like osteopathic solutions to foot problems, but in reality, almost no one had that kind of expertise or knowledge or experience. They had no way of making any real meaningful decisions based on what they were seeing. It was just a gimmick and a gravy train. And by golly, they didn't need some boffin telling them that their killer sales pitch was going to give them cancer. And so the machines prospered for a couple of decades. In fact, by the nineteen forties, there was something like ten thousand fluoroscopes in the United States alone, There were another say, three thousand in the UK, and there were a few thousand more in a couple of other countries. So just imagine for a moment all those store employees who absorbed way more X rays than any person is supposed to in a day. Just most people wouldn't even absorb that much in a full year, And day after day, these folks were getting blasted by X rays. When in the mid nineteen forties, the American Standards Association made a determination about X rays. They concluded that at max, a person should encounter less than zero point one rent gens worth of radiation per day. Now, in nineteen forty eight, there was a survey done of around forty something machines that were being used in Detroit, these fluoroscope machines, and in that study they found that the machines emitted radiation at a level between sixteen to seventy five rent gens per minute. You were not supposed to absorb more than point one per day. Now, keep in mind the standards those are for, like super protective, let's be extra careful, let's limit liability as much as possible. So you could argue that it's overly cautious, if you want to take that point of view. But the point being that these machines were putting out way more radiation than what people were supposed to be encountering in a work environment. They were dangerous, and they were largely unregulated. In the United States, laws about these devices were on a state by state basis. In fact, it wouldn't be until the nineteen seventies that you would start to see laws across the country limiting their use and requiring the machines to adhere to strict rules for manufacturing and operation. Pennsylvania was the first US state to ban them outright, That was in nineteen fifty seven. Even by nineteen seventy only thirty three states had a ban in place. The federal government couldn't take action until the early nineteen seventies because there was no legal basis. The FDA, which was the most likely organization to be able to step in, had no authority for anything that had to do with radiation that was not part of their responsibilities, so there was nothing they could do. There was no legal basis to make any kind of action on a federal level. This was a case where technology and science had far outpaced our laws and our capacity to do anything from a legal standpoint, which sounds familiar to me as I talk about this, and as I talk about things like AI. Now. One thing that may have somewhat taken the wind out of the fluoroscopes sales was the Second World War. Before the introduction of the atom bomb, radiation was thought of as more like this amazing kind of energy that could do phenomenal stuff, like like you could use radiation for anything to in science fiction, it was to blast around in space, or fly at incredible speeds over the land, or all sorts of things, and you'd be able to use is it for industry? Radiation was wonderful, you know, maybe you'd even power a superhero. But then you get to the end of World War Two, when Fat Man and Little Boy demonstrated the dreadful power of the atom, and the stories of radiation poisoning and terrible things of that nature really changed the picture. Pretty quickly. People saw the destructive nature of radiation, or the destructive capability I guess I should say of radiation. And so now the perception shifted dramatically. They went from space age energy to this is something we should be scared of. It's an invisible killer. Be afraid. You know, you get into the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, all this perception of radiation changes. It was a massive cultural shift. Keep in mind, the radiation itself never changed. It was the same from beginning to end. It was that way before we got here, it'll be that way after we leave. It's just our perception that changed. And it's interesting because we would embrace our fear along with ignorance about radiation in the exact same way that we embraced exuberance and ignorance about radiation earlier, you know, a few decades earlier. But now instead of thinking, hey, I can use this invisible ray to see my bones and make my feet fit better in these shoes, now people are thinking radiation will create bloodthirsty monsters that will hunt us all down. So the pendulum ever swings. All right, We're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about fluoroscopes and what happened with those, as well as kind of related back to what I think it has to do with artificial intelligence. But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay, so we're back to talk more about fluoroscopes and the use of X rays and shoe stores. There was something of a decline and interest in fluoroscopes after World War Two, but as I mentioned, the technology actually stuck around for decades. Right. I saw articles that said as late as the nineteen seventies there were a few places that were still using them. And these days you can sometimes find an example of a fluoroscope in a place like a museum, but otherwise you're not likely to run into one and that's for the best, because, as I have said, these devices were dangerous. Now, I am unaware of any kind of comprehensive study that looked into how many people in shoe stores were injured by these devices. There are certainly incidents, isolated incidents that we can point to. For example, Harold Baveley reported in a paper for National Safety News back in nineteen fifty that a woman who had been serving as a shoe model in a store ended up having radiation burns on one leg just from the fact that she was going into the store every day and they were operating this fluoroscope, and the leakage from these cabinets could go as far as ten feet away. These stores were not necessarily huge, so this woman had suffered a severe radiation burn on one leg, and ultimately doctors chose to amputate the leg because that's how serious it had become. That's a terrible story. That's just one, though. There are a couple of others at least that are fairly well documented and seem to link back to the use of these fluoroscopes in shoe stores. But part of the challenge of actually assessing the impact these machines could have had on store employees. Is that, apart from acute injuries like radiation burns, it could be hard to ascribe radiation as the reason for a problem. We really think of radiation as increasing risk for certain things like cancer. But that's increasing risk, like you might have cancer. But then can you actually track that back and say, the reason I have cancer is because of the increased risk that I endured due to exposure to X rays. That's harder to determine, right, Like you might not be able to track down the actual source the reason for the cancer. If you have a large enough sample size, then you might be able to draw some general conclusions. But there's just not been any kind of study like that, so it's not always an open and shut case. You cannot just definitively say X number of people ended up encountering massive health problems due to their exposure to fluoroscopes. That's just not a metric that we can confidently point at. We can certainly say the likelihood is very high that lots of people ended up having health problems due to those fluoroscopes, but that's about as far as we can go. It gets very vague. One important thing to remember though, is that shoe fluoroscopes were categorically a bad idea. They had no justification. It was a bad way to use a new technology. It's not that the technology itself was bad, it was just a bad implementation, right. Obviously, X rays have their use. We use X rays today for lots of stuff, just not to fit shoes on people. It's a technology that posed dangers that we did not fully understand or appreciate when we developed the technology. It put people at risk unnecessarily, and you can make the argument that they didn't really do anything useful at all, right, It just served as a sales gimmick because the people who were actually running the tech didn't have the training or knowledge to do anything useful with the information other than sell some shoes. And that really does bring me back to artificial intelligence. I see the rush to integrate AI into business solutions as being somewhat similar to how these shoe stores were doing this with X ray machines. I am convinced that many of the business leaders who are making these choices do not yet have a real firm grasp on what they actually intend to accomplish with AI. It's not that artificial intelligence is useless. It's not that it's bad, but artificial intelligence can also end up being risky depending on how you implement it. It could even be dangerous, and unless you are implementing it the right way and for the right reasons, then you're far more likely to do more harm than you are to do good. Now, that harm could just be in the of business results. Maybe it just means that in the short term you don't perform as well as you had hoped, or you have demoralized your employee base, and now you have to rebuild because it turns out the AI couldn't do what you needed it to do, or it was doing it in a way that wasn't helpful, or that harm could be something far more tangible. Ultimately, it could even be tragic. Now, am I off base? Is there no parallel here? I'm not convinced. To me. It feels like we're walking down a path that we've walked down many times before, or maybe even we're not walking down a path. We're barreling through the woods in the same general direction as one we've taken before, and it was a direction that ended up getting us scraped up, bumped up, We lost people along the way, and I think we're doing it again. I do not necessarily think AI is going to spell the end of everything. I'm not a doomsayer. I'm not saying AI is going to end us. All I do think what we're seeing right now is kind of an undirected scramble that's largely fed by the fear of being left behind. That you have business leaders who are saying, we can't sleep on this because if we do, our competitors are going to get ahead of us and we'll never catch up. I think that's what's feeding a lot of this discourse, and often that can mean that you actually end up pushing yourself backward because you make a bad implementation. Then if you had just stayed the course. Not that I'm saying anyone has to just do things the way they've always done them, because that's how they've always done them, but they do need to have a greater understanding of the technology and its consequences before putting it in action. That to me just as common sense, And again we just look back at the fluoroscopes in these shoe stores to say, here's an example of what can go wrong if we don't take those steps. People get sick, they could even die. It's something that we need to keep in mind. Okay, that's it for this episode of tech stuff. I thought it was really interesting to dive back into that part of the tech. This does obviously have parallels elsewhere in the tech space. I mean, there were the so called radium girls, the women who would use little paint brushes to paint thin lines of radium on watch hands and watch numbers so that you could have glow in the dark watches. Often they would end up licking their paint brushes in order to be able to keep it at a fine point, and a lot of those women ended up having terrible problems later on in life because of radiation. So again, it's not the only case where we embraced a technology and a phenomenon that we didn't really understand fully and we did so without any hesitation, and people ultimately paid the price for that. So again, just words of caution out there for us to consider on occasion while we're hearing all the evangelists push really hard for companies to jump on board and adopt this stuff. That's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? This morning I was thinking, as I often do, about artificial intelligence and how quickly various people and companies are rushing to apply AI to just about everything. And this isn't exactly new. It would be naive and reductive to say it. We're so Researchers have been developing AI for decades, with a focus on different aspects of AI throughout the ages generative AI, while splashy is really just one of the more recent implementations that have has caught our attention. So while we can't say that AI has exactly crept up on us, the push to make use of AI, when one could argue we don't even have a full appreciation for what it can do, both in good and bad scenarios, means that we're being a little premature. And this actually reminds me of shoe stores. Now that's a pretty big leap, but I promise I'm going somewhere. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase history repeats itself, or maybe the slightly more florid version. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, once upon a time there was an era in which people made use of a powerful technology for a trivial purpose, and many people potentially paid the price for that decision. This is just one example. Obviously, there are lots of others, some of which are famous enough to have had entire documentaries made about their stories. But I am talking about when shoe salespeople were regularly irradiated as part of their job. Okay, so let's set the scene, and it's the last decade of the nineteenth century, eighteen ninety five in fact, and a German smarty pants by the name of Wilhelm Konrad Runtgen was working as the director of the Physical Institute at the University of Fursburg. Now I don't mean he was working at a physical school and other people were, I don't know, working in some sort of philosophically hypothetical school that would be putting discartes before the horse. Rather, I mean Runtgen specialized in physics. In the eighteen nineties, he was experimenting with a fairly new technology. What essentially was a cathode ray tube or CRT. This is the technology that would later be responsible for producing images in old television sets, the big, boxy kind that you might remember from decades ago. Runtgn was studying how high voltage electricity could pass through low vacuum tubes, like essentially a cathode ray tube. Now, the story goes that one day he was shutting things down for the evening in his lab and he noticed something peculiar. So he had covered the cathode tube with a piece of black cardboard, and when he powered up the tube and turned off the light, he saw that there was something glowing in his lab. So he investigates and he discovers the glowing is coming from a piece of paper that has a coating of barium platinu cyanide on it, and that this is what was glowing in the dark, and it was several feet away from the tube, which again was covered by black cardboard. It was far enough away from the tube that Runkan thought the tube would not be able to illuminate this particular piece of paper. Moreover, there was some sort of energy outside of visible light happening here, something that could stimulate the barium platinus cyanide to fluoresce and something that could pass through this black cardboard. Now, Runkan was a methodical sort, and he repeated this somewhat accidental experiment many times to make certain that what he was seeing was actually real, that there was something to it. He further investigated the phenomena for weeks before deciding to publish any papers or even discuss the matter with anyone else. He knew that lots of other people were doing experiments with these low vacuum tubes, so he didn't want to tip his hand too early and perhaps lose out on snag a really big scientific discovery. Turns out, this was a really good idea because there were no shortage of people who were absolutely certain they had discovered something new and exciting, and then after other people looked into it, they found out that there wasn't really any discovery there at all, which could be pretty humiliating, but this was not the case with Rutgin. He had made the first documented observation of what we would call X rays, in fact, what he would call X rays X rays because X represents an unknown variable. What's more, Runkin noticed something really darn cool. So let's say that he hung up a sheet of paper that had a coating of barium platino cyanide on it, and he put that a few feet away from the tube, and then he energizes the tube, he turns it on. Essentially, if he put his hand between the tube, which was serving as a lamp and the sheet of paper, then on the sheet of paper he would see projected the bones of his hand. It was as though he could see straight through his flesh and look at the skeleton inside. Clearly, he couldn't just keep this a secret, so he had to tell his closest friend. He brought his wife to his lab and showed her the discovery. He had her hold her hand against a sheet of this paper, and then he exposed her hand for a fifteen minute long X ray exposure, and instead of it just projecting the images of the bones on the sheet of paper, it actually made a record of it, an image like a photograph, the first radiograph known on record. She reportedly exclaimed, I have seen my own death, meaning she had seen her own skeleton. Those the Rengins really knew how to turn up the romance. It tells you anyway, after weeks of investigative work, Jen reached a point where he felt confident in coming forward to his peers to present his findings, and once he did, it caught on like a house on fire. His paper published at the end of eighteen ninety five in December of eighteen ninety five. By eighteen ninety six, people were making practical use of X rays. Mostly this was in the medical field, but not exclusively, because suddenly it was possible for physicians to gaze into the human body, you know, looking into a patient without first having to make an opening, which, as you can imagine, presents certain advantages. All right, but now it's time to jump to a different smarty pants, someone who was quite the opportunistic smarty pants. In fact, some people could argue that the true smarty pants nature of this man is that he found new ways to claim authorship over work that really just happened within him his place of business. I am talking about Thomas Edison. Now, whether you think of Edison as a truly brilliant inventor responsible for inventing countless things in his lifetime, or you think of him as someone who was more likely to employ people who did most of the actual inventing, and then he would put his names on the patents. I'll leave all that to you. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere in the middle. But the important part of our story is that Edison and his staff were working on a technology that would leverage X rays in a really interesting way. So the basic concept wasn't that different from what Reunjin had been experimenting with in his lab. The invention would have a screen that would be coded with some sort of fluorescent material on it and would thus fluoresce when exposed to X rays. There would also be a lamp capable of generating those X rays, and if you were to place something between the lamp and the screen, you would be able to see the stuff that blocked X rays from hitting the screen. Now, your flesh would let X rays pass right through it, so you would see your bones on the fluorescent screen behind, and you can have the lamp on, you can move your hand back and forth, and you can watch the bones in your hands move in real time. Edison called his invention the vitascope, and I'm pretty sure later on he thought that was a really ironic name, a poor name for him to pick for this invention because vita means life, you can see that in words like vitality. But the vitoscope would actually lead to the death of one of Edison's most loyal members of staff. That person was Clarence Madison Dally. He, like his father and his brothers, would work as a glassblower for T. Thomas Edison. Dally worked closely with Edison while trying to design a practical incandescent lamp. Again, Essen didn't really invent the light bulb, but in his lab the light bulb was turned into something that was actually of practical use. Now, upon runk Jen's discovery of X rays, Dali would actually shift his own work to focus on creating X ray lamps as well as a fluorescent sheet that actually used calcium tungue state as the fluorescing material instead of the barium platinum cyanide. This was seen to produce sharper images and thus a higher fidelity kind of image. For years, Dali worked in the lab developing this technology, perfecting it, and over time he began to experience some pretty not just pretty, some truly serious health problems. His hands showed signs of radiation burns, particularly his left hand, which he used to demonstrate the X rays by waving it in the path of the X rays. He began to develop skin lesions, which are part of you know, radiation burns. His problems progressed to the point that he actually had to have his left hand amputated, but that was only the beginning. Later on he had to have more of his left arm amputated, then several of the fingers on his right hand, and then ultimately he had one arm amputated to the elbow and the other arm amputated to the shoulder. But the damage was even more severe, and in nineteen oh four, when he was not even forty years old, Dally passed away from terminal cancer. This experience hit Edison very, very hard. He truly liked Dali, and it also convinced him that X ray technology was far more dangerous than beneficial, and he was quoted to say, don't talk to me about x I am afraid of them. But Edison's team had already invented the fluoroscope at that point, and there were all sorts of potential applications for that technology. When we come back, I'll talk about some of those, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, before the break, I mentioned that Edison's fluoroscope would end up having various applications, So the most obvious ones were in medicine, right, and there was a darn good reason to lean heavily on medicine in the early twentieth century. You had a real provocative reason why you wanted to advance the science of medicine. Several million reasons, as it turned out, because in July nineteen fourteen, World War One began. Of course, back then we didn't call it World War one because being optimistic anyway. One of the big challenges presented by the World War involved making sure soldiers had the right equipment, and that included a good pair of boots. Soldiers could end up having terrible injuries. If they weren't wearing the right boots. They wouldn't be able to march as far. They could suffer from things like trench foot, So they needed to make sure the boots were as well made and as good a fit as was practical for the purposes of mass producing them for soldiers. This is a delicate thing to balance, so the thought was we should make sure that soldiers had boots that would give them the support they needed and not create a source of distraction or injury. And so a guy named Frank Keefer created a book that he titled a Textbook of Military Hygiene and Sanitation. This was all with the goal of trying to keep soldiers as healthy as possible before they were forced to march out in front of a German machine gun in this time. Next book, Kiefer included X ray images also known as radiographs, in order to show how a soldier's foot should fit inside a boot and what it would look like if the soldier were wearing the wrong size boot. So this was really just to illustrate the importance of matching the size to the soldier. Keifer was not suggesting that the army invest in thousands of fluoroscopes and check each recruit individually. This was just to demonstrate the importance of a good fit, but his idea sparked other ideas. A doctor named Jacob J. Lowe used a fluoroscope to examine wounded soldier's feet without having to first take off their boots. And you can definitely understand how that could be a really useful thing to do. You know why, would you potentially make an injury worse or perhaps even create a new injury if you can get a look in a non invasive kind of way, and it works so well that Low thought it would make sense to bring the technology to pediatrists and to shoe stores in general. Why just use this on soldiers when you could have a fluoroscope in your local shoe shop, Customers could try on a pair of new shoes. They could step up to the fluoroscope, the staff could check to make sure that the shoes were actually a really good fit. Maybe they could even employ someone who could take a look at those images and say, oh, you know what, you need special shoes because otherwise you're not going to get the support you need and your feet are going to hurt. Right, You could actually employ people who could be experts in this. They could be like the equivalent of a foot doctor working in a shoe store and practice preventive medicine. It would be incredible. So Low files for a patent in nineteen nineteen for a shoe store version of this technology. However, it would take nearly a decade for the patent off to grant a patent. He called it the foot of scope, and I am not making a joke about that. That is actually what it would be called. And yeah, the idea is that the customer would stick their feet into this machine I'll describe it in a second, and the shoe store salesperson would be able to look through a visor and determine if the shoe was a good fit or not. Low was not the only person pursuing this dream, believe it or not. There were others around the world who were filing similar patents. And while they filed their patents after Low had already submitted his to the US Patent Office, and at least a couple of cases, they got their patents first. So kind of shows the great injustice of global commerce, right, But eventually it all shook out that really there were two major companies that would use this technology to create machines for shoe shops. So in England you had a company called the Petoscope Company, and here in the United States you had the X Ray Shoe Fitter Incorporated. Now, these fluoroscopes looked a lot like a tall wooden cabinet, maybe like a little bit higher than waist tall. So the customer would approach the cabinet on one side, and the customer would be standing up and they would step up onto a step at the base of the cabinet, and at that point in the cabinet's wall there was kind of a little alcove where they could slide their feet into this thing, so it's inside the cabinet, So you're standing on the step, your feet are now inside the cabinet. On the inside of the cabinet, the X ray lamp would actually be below the customer's feet, pointing up at a fluorescent screen, and the fluorescent screen would be above the customer's feet, so the lamp would blast X rays up through the shoes, through the flesh of the customer's feet, and would leave a moving image of dim bones on the fluorescent screen, which staff could view from above. So on the opposite side of the cabinet were the controls that the staff would use, so pretty simple stuff. They would have, you know, like a switch to turn the fluoroscope on, and at that point they would start powering up the cathode ray tube and start beaming X rays toward the fluorescent screen. There would be at least one, but usually several viewing ports that would look down from the top of the cabinet into the cabinet itself. Now, these ports remind me a little bit of like a submarine periscope, you know, has kind of like a visor kind of of attachment that fits around the eyes, which of course obviously blocks out the ambient light of the shop while you're looking at the tootsis inside the cabinet. And the multiple visors meant more than one per and could look at a time. So maybe it's the shoe salesperson, maybe they have an assistant, and there's probably some curious lookilu who wants to take a look that skeleton bones. In fact, I'm sure there was no shortage of variations of the phrase oh honey, I can see your skeleton feet and these shoe shops at the time. Anyway, the idea was the shoe salesperson would be able to study the feet inside the shoe and determine if the shoe really was a good fit. Though I'm sure in many, perhaps most cases, the real use of the technology was that it attracted customers and it helped move sales. Sure, I bet in some cases the clerk might say, this pair of shoes looks like it's on the small side. For you or maybe you need a wider pair of shoes or something along those lines. But most of the time, I bet it was really just a way to get folks into the door. Now, as I'm sure you've all gathered, this practice was also extremely dangerous. Customers might get a large dose of X rays, a larger one than they would in a normal year, especially these days. But the real risk was for the staff who were using these machines over and over on multiple customers a day. The first of these machines hit the market in nineteen twenty seven, we wouldn't even settle on a standard unit of measurement for radiation, the run Gin, named after the guy who discovered X rays. We wouldn't decide on that till nineteen twenty eight the following year, and we still didn't have that much data to draw conclusions as to how much or how little radiation exposure was really safe or harmful. Now you had some scientists who were arguing that it would be a really bad idea to make use of radiation technology in an environment like a shoe store, that it represented a true risk to employees, that radiation really was no joke. Then you had, on the other side the owners of the stores, who essentially said shut up. The stores were claiming that the X rays would let them create real like osteopathic solutions to foot problems, but in reality, almost no one had that kind of expertise or knowledge or experience. They had no way of making any real meaningful decisions based on what they were seeing. It was just a gimmick and a gravy train. And by golly, they didn't need some boffin telling them that their killer sales pitch was going to give them cancer. And so the machines prospered for a couple of decades. In fact, by the nineteen forties, there was something like ten thousand fluoroscopes in the United States alone, There were another say, three thousand in the UK, and there were a few thousand more in a couple of other countries. So just imagine for a moment all those store employees who absorbed way more X rays than any person is supposed to in a day. Just most people wouldn't even absorb that much in a full year, And day after day, these folks were getting blasted by X rays. When in the mid nineteen forties, the American Standards Association made a determination about X rays. They concluded that at max, a person should encounter less than zero point one rent gens worth of radiation per day. Now, in nineteen forty eight, there was a survey done of around forty something machines that were being used in Detroit, these fluoroscope machines, and in that study they found that the machines emitted radiation at a level between sixteen to seventy five rent gens per minute. You were not supposed to absorb more than point one per day. Now, keep in mind the standards those are for, like super protective, let's be extra careful, let's limit liability as much as possible. So you could argue that it's overly cautious, if you want to take that point of view. But the point being that these machines were putting out way more radiation than what people were supposed to be encountering in a work environment. They were dangerous, and they were largely unregulated. In the United States, laws about these devices were on a state by state basis. In fact, it wouldn't be until the nineteen seventies that you would start to see laws across the country limiting their use and requiring the machines to adhere to strict rules for manufacturing and operation. Pennsylvania was the first US state to ban them outright, That was in nineteen fifty seven. Even by nineteen seventy only thirty three states had a ban in place. The federal government couldn't take action until the early nineteen seventies because there was no legal basis. The FDA, which was the most likely organization to be able to step in, had no authority for anything that had to do with radiation that was not part of their responsibilities, so there was nothing they could do. There was no legal basis to make any kind of action on a federal level. This was a case where technology and science had far outpaced our laws and our capacity to do anything from a legal standpoint, which sounds familiar to me as I talk about this, and as I talk about things like AI. Now. One thing that may have somewhat taken the wind out of the fluoroscopes sales was the Second World War. Before the introduction of the atom bomb, radiation was thought of as more like this amazing kind of energy that could do phenomenal stuff, like like you could use radiation for anything to in science fiction, it was to blast around in space, or fly at incredible speeds over the land, or all sorts of things, and you'd be able to use is it for industry? Radiation was wonderful, you know, maybe you'd even power a superhero. But then you get to the end of World War Two, when Fat Man and Little Boy demonstrated the dreadful power of the atom, and the stories of radiation poisoning and terrible things of that nature really changed the picture. Pretty quickly. People saw the destructive nature of radiation, or the destructive capability I guess I should say of radiation. And so now the perception shifted dramatically. They went from space age energy to this is something we should be scared of. It's an invisible killer. Be afraid. You know, you get into the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, all this perception of radiation changes. It was a massive cultural shift. Keep in mind, the radiation itself never changed. It was the same from beginning to end. It was that way before we got here, it'll be that way after we leave. It's just our perception that changed. And it's interesting because we would embrace our fear along with ignorance about radiation in the exact same way that we embraced exuberance and ignorance about radiation earlier, you know, a few decades earlier. But now instead of thinking, hey, I can use this invisible ray to see my bones and make my feet fit better in these shoes, now people are thinking radiation will create bloodthirsty monsters that will hunt us all down. So the pendulum ever swings. All right, We're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about fluoroscopes and what happened with those, as well as kind of related back to what I think it has to do with artificial intelligence. But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay, so we're back to talk more about fluoroscopes and the use of X rays and shoe stores. There was something of a decline and interest in fluoroscopes after World War Two, but as I mentioned, the technology actually stuck around for decades. Right. I saw articles that said as late as the nineteen seventies there were a few places that were still using them. And these days you can sometimes find an example of a fluoroscope in a place like a museum, but otherwise you're not likely to run into one and that's for the best, because, as I have said, these devices were dangerous. Now, I am unaware of any kind of comprehensive study that looked into how many people in shoe stores were injured by these devices. There are certainly incidents, isolated incidents that we can point to. For example, Harold Baveley reported in a paper for National Safety News back in nineteen fifty that a woman who had been serving as a shoe model in a store ended up having radiation burns on one leg just from the fact that she was going into the store every day and they were operating this fluoroscope, and the leakage from these cabinets could go as far as ten feet away. These stores were not necessarily huge, so this woman had suffered a severe radiation burn on one leg, and ultimately doctors chose to amputate the leg because that's how serious it had become. That's a terrible story. That's just one, though. There are a couple of others at least that are fairly well documented and seem to link back to the use of these fluoroscopes in shoe stores. But part of the challenge of actually assessing the impact these machines could have had on store employees. Is that, apart from acute injuries like radiation burns, it could be hard to ascribe radiation as the reason for a problem. We really think of radiation as increasing risk for certain things like cancer. But that's increasing risk, like you might have cancer. But then can you actually track that back and say, the reason I have cancer is because of the increased risk that I endured due to exposure to X rays. That's harder to determine, right, Like you might not be able to track down the actual source the reason for the cancer. If you have a large enough sample size, then you might be able to draw some general conclusions. But there's just not been any kind of study like that, so it's not always an open and shut case. You cannot just definitively say X number of people ended up encountering massive health problems due to their exposure to fluoroscopes. That's just not a metric that we can confidently point at. We can certainly say the likelihood is very high that lots of people ended up having health problems due to those fluoroscopes, but that's about as far as we can go. It gets very vague. One important thing to remember though, is that shoe fluoroscopes were categorically a bad idea. They had no justification. It was a bad way to use a new technology. It's not that the technology itself was bad, it was just a bad implementation, right. Obviously, X rays have their use. We use X rays today for lots of stuff, just not to fit shoes on people. It's a technology that posed dangers that we did not fully understand or appreciate when we developed the technology. It put people at risk unnecessarily, and you can make the argument that they didn't really do anything useful at all, right, It just served as a sales gimmick because the people who were actually running the tech didn't have the training or knowledge to do anything useful with the information other than sell some shoes. And that really does bring me back to artificial intelligence. I see the rush to integrate AI into business solutions as being somewhat similar to how these shoe stores were doing this with X ray machines. I am convinced that many of the business leaders who are making these choices do not yet have a real firm grasp on what they actually intend to accomplish with AI. It's not that artificial intelligence is useless. It's not that it's bad, but artificial intelligence can also end up being risky depending on how you implement it. It could even be dangerous, and unless you are implementing it the right way and for the right reasons, then you're far more likely to do more harm than you are to do good. Now, that harm could just be in the of business results. Maybe it just means that in the short term you don't perform as well as you had hoped, or you have demoralized your employee base, and now you have to rebuild because it turns out the AI couldn't do what you needed it to do, or it was doing it in a way that wasn't helpful, or that harm could be something far more tangible. Ultimately, it could even be tragic. Now, am I off base? Is there no parallel here? I'm not convinced. To me. It feels like we're walking down a path that we've walked down many times before, or maybe even we're not walking down a path. We're barreling through the woods in the same general direction as one we've taken before, and it was a direction that ended up getting us scraped up, bumped up, We lost people along the way, and I think we're doing it again. I do not necessarily think AI is going to spell the end of everything. I'm not a doomsayer. I'm not saying AI is going to end us. All I do think what we're seeing right now is kind of an undirected scramble that's largely fed by the fear of being left behind. That you have business leaders who are saying, we can't sleep on this because if we do, our competitors are going to get ahead of us and we'll never catch up. I think that's what's feeding a lot of this discourse, and often that can mean that you actually end up pushing yourself backward because you make a bad implementation. Then if you had just stayed the course. Not that I'm saying anyone has to just do things the way they've always done them, because that's how they've always done them, but they do need to have a greater understanding of the technology and its consequences before putting it in action. That to me just as common sense, And again we just look back at the fluoroscopes in these shoe stores to say, here's an example of what can go wrong if we don't take those steps. People get sick, they could even die. It's something that we need to keep in mind. Okay, that's it for this episode of tech stuff. I thought it was really interesting to dive back into that part of the tech. This does obviously have parallels elsewhere in the tech space. I mean, there were the so called radium girls, the women who would use little paint brushes to paint thin lines of radium on watch hands and watch numbers so that you could have glow in the dark watches. Often they would end up licking their paint brushes in order to be able to keep it at a fine point, and a lot of those women ended up having terrible problems later on in life because of radiation. So again, it's not the only case where we embraced a technology and a phenomenon that we didn't really understand fully and we did so without any hesitation, and people ultimately paid the price for that. So again, just words of caution out there for us to consider on occasion while we're hearing all the evangelists push really hard for companies to jump on board and adopt this stuff. That's it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.