Hows about those days where you could go to a shoe store and see an X-ray of your feet?
??
oooooops I have dated myself.............ha
fred.
I remember those. What about the fluoroscopes where you stood between the x-ray tube and the screen, the doctor turned it on, had you breathe in and out, and you stood there for 20 seconds or so, while enough x-radiation was passing through you to light up the screen like a CRT as your chest was being examined. Imagine how much radiation the patient was getting. But even more, the doctor, who did this every day over a period of years.
I once picked up an old fluoroscope from a dump pile and got it running. I fired it up a few times, always shining the beam away from me, and viewing the screen through a mirror. I thought I was being safe, until I borrowed a geiger counter and happened to have it turned on at the other side of the room, and as soon as I fired up that machine, the counter sounded just like a bad case of a.c. power line noise. It was radiating a lesser amount in every direction, even though the main beam passed through the little window in the unit. I turned the thing off immediately and never fired it up again, and used the autotransformer as a plate voltage control for my first kilowatt transmitter.
To-day's fluoroscopes radiate only a minuscule amount of radiation into something like a sensitive TV camera tube, where the signal is amplified and displayed on a computer screen, but even so, the x-ray technician moves out of the shielded room while the x-rays are on, and the doctor views the screen from a remote location.
I have wondered if my cataracts, which first were diagnosed at age 35, but not treated until they began to seriously impair my vision at about age 60, could have been related to my exposure to x-rays from that machine.