At Coney Island in the summer of 1926, exactly 100 years ago today, past the roller coasters and the carnival barkers, there was a show called "Baby Incubator."

A young man and his girl stopped in front of it, and when the gateman told them the price, the young man waved him off. "We don't pay," he said. "We're alumni." He meant it literally. He'd been born premature and spent his first weeks of life inside one of those glass cases. By 1926, roughly 3,000 grown adults could say the same thing, and the show let every one of them in free.

The show was run by a man the papers called Dr. Martin A. Couney. Hospitals of the era mostly wouldn't treat premature infants at all, dismissing them as "weaklings" not worth the resources. Couney took them anyway, no exceptions, and never charged a parent, guardian, institution, or city a single fee for the care. By 1939, over 43 years of doing this, he'd handled roughly 9,000 premature babies and raised about 6,500 of them, including, at one point, his own daughter Hildegarde, born at under three pounds and eventually his nurse. "Every mail brings me letters from my incubator graduates," he told a reporter that year. "A day hardly passes that I'm not invited to a birthday party, a school graduation, or a wedding of one of my babies."