World’s Fairs and Freak Shows
As far back as the 1600s, people paid money to see unusual human deformities. This form of entertainment was taken to the extreme under the great showman Phineas Taylor Barnum. P.T. Barnum purchased a museum near Wall Street in Manhattan in 1841. His “Barnum’s American Museum” became a showplace for albinos, giants, little people, exotic women, magicians, and jugglers. Barnum created hoaxes to wow his paying customers. In one famous exhibit, he claimed that an 11-year-old boy was the “Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone.” In reality, he had trained a 4-year-old boy to play Hercules and Napoleon, and to drink wine and smoke cigars for the public’s enjoyment. And the public loved it and many other oddities.
Traveling shows that exhibited humans with physical and cognitive disabilities were wildly popular. Industrialization created a working class. These factory workers must have found comfort in paying to view people whose conditions seemed worse than their own. For a few pennies, a factory worker could take his family to a freak show to see conjoined twins, extremely fat men on bikes, dwarfs, people suffering from what appeared to be a shrunken head but was really microcephaly.
It is in this environment that Dr. Martin Couney created an incubator display. This rather controversial move had his critics debunking his mode of treatments. While he studied medicine in Germany and France, it remains unclear if he was a doctor. There are some reports that he was actually a traveling salesman of medical tools. Regardless of his background, he found willing audiences in his freak show concept that married modern medical technology. His goal was to convince the public and medical community that preterm infants were worth saving.
He began his odd marriage of freak show and technology at the Berlin Exposition of 1896. There he created a baby incubator exhibit that placed very small infants on display. People paid a fee and walked inside the exhibit where nurses were caring for the babies in electrified machines. Here the babies were growing right in front of the eyes of the paying public! The exhibit was very successful.
Dr. Couney continued displaying his baby incubators at the Earl’s Court Exposition Centre in London; the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898; The World’s Fair in Paris in 1900 and Buffalo, New York in 1901; and many more. Then fate called. Developers were building a new amusement park in Brooklyn. Dr. Couney did not let this opportunity pass him by.