Child hatchery
The babies were saved by a quick transfer to the Luna Park incubators, some of the lodgers doubling up.
In its eighth year, Dreamland underwent big changes. In hopes of competing with its more upscale neighbor, Luna Park, its owners changed management, repainted buildings and employed a small army of workers to fix sections that had fallen into disrepair. It was at roughly 1:30 AM the morning of May 27 that a light exploded, leaving night repairmen in darkness. An accidental kick to a bucket of pitch ignited a fire that tore through the park in a matter of hours.
“[A] blaze started in the Dreamland Park at Coney Island time after midnight last night and, feeding on the flimsy woodwork and paper mache structures which enclose the park, it gained good headway before it was discovered at 2:10 o’clock,” The New York Times wrote that morning of the grim scene that left little more than smoldering embers in its wake.
Captain Bonavita, Coney’s one-armed lion tamer (felled six years later by a polar bear), scrambled to save his menagerie. Some survived, escaping into the streets of Brooklyn, but sixty other animals were not so lucky. The early edition of The Times reported another tragedy, as six premature babies perished – half from smoke inhalation, half from the fire. The article describes the valiant – if fruitless – heroics of Fire Sergeant Klinck, who beelined to the famous infants, the moment he got the call.
A later edition of the paper happily corrected the record. All the babies had actually survived. Nearly 40 years later, it would once again address the story, noting, “the babies were saved by a quick transfer to the Luna Park incubators, some of the lodgers doubling up.” This time, the occasion was another solemn one: the death of Martin Couney, the man synonymous with the Coney Island incubators.
The obituary unsurprisingly offers no insight into the first 27 years of his life. The date and location of Couney’s (née Cohn or, perhaps, Cohen) birth are unclear. So, too, is the validity of his medical degree. His claims of studying medicine in Leipzig and Berlin are possibly dubious.
Nor did Couney actually invent the infant incubator. That distinction belongs to surgeon Jean-Louis-Paul Denucé. Two decades later, French obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier created a functioning version of a “baby-warming device,” heavily inspired by poultry incubators. But while Tarnier’s system was able to decrease infant mortality by nearly 30%, the technology was derided abroad for being too costly and unscientific.
The burgeoning eugenics movement, meanwhile, objected to the systems on even more problematic grounds.
Tarnier’s successor, Pierre-Constant Budin, brought the technology to the 1869 Berlin Great Industrial Exposition, with Couney serving as his intermediary. Show goers crowded around the wood and glass Kinderbrutanstalt (child hatcheries), housing a half-dozen babies too weak to live on their own. Around 3,600 people visited on opening day.
“The employment of incubators as a means of saving the lives of prematurely born or of very weakly infants has not yet become general in England,” The Lancet wrote shortly after the exhibit. “Yet it is notorious and obvious that the best, almost the only, means of saving such infants is to protect them absolutely from change of temperature and from cold.”
Couney soon immigrated to the United States, bringing along his child hatcheries under the slightly more formal “Infantorium” name. As he extended his reach, he clung onto the spectacle, choosing Coney Island’s warring Dreamland and Luna Park as the sites of his most prominent exhibit. Incubators were constructed from steel and glass, with a pipe full of water delivering regulated heat up through a mesh layer to the infant inside.
In 1903, each tiny occupant cost the exhibit $15 (roughly $440) a day. Despite this exorbitant cost, Couney didn’t charge the parents, instead relying on the $0.10 admission fee park goers paid to gawk at the strange spectacle. The babies were exhibited all day, but for two hours of feeding, wherein on-staff wet nurses supplied them with breast milk.
The Brooklyn Eagle fairly referred to the setup as the “Strangest Place on Earth for Human Tots to Be Fed, Nursed and Cared For.” All told, the exhibit ran for 40 years, with another setup in Atlantic City lasting nearly as long. Couney also brought the show on the road to various exhibits across the U.S., like the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair. “Living Babies in Incubators,” read a sign at the Chicago World’s Fair reportedly so massive it could be seen on the other side of the park.
The sideshow nature of the exhibits drew criticism, and some in the medical community attempted to shut down the Infantorium. Ultimately, however, the results spoke for themselves. Couney claimed an 85-percent success rate, saving around 6,500 premature babies over the course of his career. And while no exact figures exist, the numbers were almost certainly in the thousands.
"Nobody else was offering to do anything to save me," one said, decades later recounting how Couney traveled to the hospital to convince her parents to brings her to Coney Island for free care. “Without Martin Couney I wouldn't have had a life.”
Sources:
Martin A. Couney, ‘Incubator Doctor’ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/03/02/87287167.html?pageNumber=27
How one man saved a generation of premature babies https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36321692
The Man Who Ran a Carnival Attraction That Saved Thousands of Premature Babies Wasn’t a Doctor at All https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-pretended-be-doctor-ran-worlds-fair-attraction-saved-lives-thousands-premature-babies-180960200/
Coney Island's Incubator Babies https://daily.jstor.org/coney-islands-incubator-babies/