y the time X-ray machines such as the one pictured here were displayed at the 1931 British Institute of Radiology Annual Congress and Exhibition, scientists routinely wielded them to diagnose maladies from broken bones to metastasized tumors. The machine's use quickly expanded from the clinical to the comical - and the creepy: While shoe stores radiated customers' feet to "scientifically" determine if the pumps they tried on were pressing on their bones, newspapers reported physicians were turning African-Americans into Caucasians by lightening their skin with repeated blasts of the rays.