Martin Couney does not appear to have had any medical credentials. Although he did often claim to be a protege of the French doctor Pierre-Constant Budin – a man who popularized incubators in Europe – there was never any evidence for this claim. Incubators were developed for babies back in the 1880s, in Paris. Martin Couney first displayed them at the Berlin Exposition in 1896. From then on, he traveled to more exhibitions but finally settled in the US in 1903 to run the sideshow of babies-in-incubators, which continued on until the early 1940s.