The Baby Incubator Spent Decades as a Carnival Act Before Hospitals Would Touch It

In the early 1900s, if you were born premature in America, your best shot at survival wasn't a hospital. It was a sideshow at Coney Island.

French obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier got the idea for an infant incubator after watching a device warm baby chickens at a Parisian zoo, reasoning that something similar could save premature infants from dying of hypothermia. At the time, most premature babies died, and many doctors considered caring for them pointless. Tarnier's early designs weren't much better than blankets or hot water bottles. A generation later, Pierre Budin improved the device with thermostats and better ventilation, then reportedly asked his student Martin Couney to demonstrate it at the 1896 Berlin World's Fair.

Couney saw what the hospitals wouldn't. He understood that the exhibit would save lives and that the public would pay to watch. Though historians now believe he held no medical degree, he was driven in part by the premature birth of his own daughter. Tourists on the Coney Island boardwalk heard barkers call out: "Don't forget to see the babies!" Those who stopped paid a quarter to enter a room where infants weighing two or three pounds each lay in individual incubators under round-the-clock care from wet nurses and attendants. The entrance fees covered operating costs. Couney never charged the parents.

The medical establishment was unmoved. In 1897, an anonymous source in The Lancet condemned the exposition as "an unscrupulous way to make money." The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children accused Couney of exploitation and endangerment. Meanwhile, Couney claimed an 85 percent survival rate and saved more than 6,500 infants over his career. Even into the 1930s, many U.S. hospitals had no incubators at all.

In 1943, Couney closed the Coney Island exhibit after Cornell Hospital in New York City opened the country's first dedicated premature infant unit with incubators. He died in 1950, reportedly penniless.

The infrastructure and programs that now define neonatal intensive care are real and documented. They were pioneered, in large part, at a boardwalk attraction, against the consensus of organized medicine, by a man who may not have held a medical degree.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics, June 16, 2026

Hot Take: Medicine spent decades labeling premature babies as unviable while a carnival barker on a boardwalk ran the best neonatal unit in the country, which is less a historical curiosity than a case study in who gets to decide what counts as treatment worth providing.