The Lion Incubator

The story of the Lion Incubator begins not in a hospital, but on a farm in southern France. Known locally as “Lion les poulets” (Chicken Lion), Alexandre Lion was a successful inventor of agricultural equipment. In 1889, he patented a massive industrial incubator capable of hatching 5,000 eggs at once. To showcase his invention, he opened a pavilion in Marseille where the public paid a small fee to watch the mechanical “birth” of hundreds of chicks. This experience provided Lion with two things: a perfect understanding of precision thermoregulation and a proven business model for public exhibitions. He filed a patent for his poultry incubator that also included some tentative drawings of use with infants in 1889.

Lion realized that the “wooden box” incubators for infants used by medical pioneers like Stéphane Tarnier were technically limited because they required manual heat adjustments. Leveraging his poultry patents, he adapted his technology for human use. In May 1890, he repurposed his Marseille “poultry pavilion” to accept “weakly born” infants. After successfully saving five of the first six infants admitted, he secured medical credibility and filed his primary infant incubator patents in 1891 (patent awarded in 1892).

The “Lion Incubator” (Couveuse Lion) was a sophisticated leap forward in medical engineering, characterized by four distinct features:

• Automatic Thermoregulation: Unlike manual models, Lion’s design utilized a sensitive thermostat that automatically controlled a gas burner to maintain a constant temperature.
• External Boiler System: To ensure safety and air quality, the heating element—a cylindrical water boiler—was mounted on the outside of the incubator, circulating warm water through internal pipes to radiate heat.
• Forced Ventilation and Filtration: Lion pioneered “clean air” technology by drawing fresh air from outside the building through pipes, passing it through cotton wool filters, and then heating it before it entered the chamber.
• Aseptic Construction: Replacing wood with nickel-plated steel and glass, the design allowed for easy disinfection and provided the public with a clear view of the infants, which was essential for his funding model.

Comparison of the most popular incubators used in the 1880s and 1890s:

Lion adopted several different approaches to popularize his invention and generate revenue.

Building on the success of his initial exhibit in Marseille, Lion opened “Maternité Lion” in Nice, France, The municipality in Nice granted Lion money to support the Maternité, which also received charitable donations by wealthy locals. The Maternité used Lion’s incubators to care for premature infants from all social classes, largely acting as a charity. The charity in Nice reported a seventy-two percent survival rate among 185 premature infants. Around 1891, he opened his flagship “institute” called Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants in Paris at 26 Boulevard Poissonnière.. He where he continued to care for infants free of charge to parents, funded entirely by admission fees from the public. Over time, he established additional institutes in Bordeaux, Lyon, Liege, Brussels, and New York City. There may have been others. The establishment at 26 B. Poissonniere in Paris is the best documented, it eventually moved to 23, Avenue Daumesnil and shortly after 5 Rue Cart in Saint-Mandé,

Separate from his storefront “institutes,” Lion managed “incubator baby exhibits” in purpose-built buildings at multiple fairs and expositions throughout the late 1880s and early 1900s. His earliest known participation in an exposition is the Lyon Exposition Universelle et Coloniale in 1894, the best known are Berlin in 1896 and Paris in 1900, and his last known participation in an exposition was the Exposition Internationale Urbaine de Lyon in 1914, which was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. Finding information about his participation in some of these shows has been challenging, but you can find a list of the exhibits we have been able to document to a lesser or greater extent at the end of this page under the heading “Worlds Fairs and Expositions.” In particular, the Berlin and Paris incubator exhibits included 2 important innovations:

• Berlin exposition of 1896: To handle the massive crowds, Lion’s team modified the incubator layout into a U-shaped gallery. The pavilion allowed the public to view the six Lion incubators from a central area through the glass windows while the medical staff worked in the “inner” area of the U-shape.
• Paris exposition of 1900: Lion showcased his most industrial version, which featured a centralized air-purification plant that scrubbed and humidified air for a row of over 20 incubators, along with a specialized station within the exhibit for wet nurses, highlighting his holistic approach. The exhibit was located in the “Social Economy and Hygiene” section, framing the technology as a solution to France’s “depopulation” crisis.

Lion also sold or rented his incubators to multiple hospitals in France, across Europe, and even in the US and Mexico, and they were commonly used at fairs and expositions in the U.S by entrepreneurs including Martin Couney. One of his souvenir booklets from the Maternité Lion in Paris around 1900 lists over 25 different hospitals and Maternités that were using his incubator, and he is also known to have offered his incubators for rent to parents for use in their home. The Paris Maternité at Port Royal did not adopt his incubator, however, they felt that it was too complex and required more support than their own staff could manage.

The image below is a cutaway view of the Lion Incubator, from a Lion exhibit sourvenir booklet at the 1898 Torino Italian General Exhibition. (PDF of booklet supplied by Drs. Thijs Gras, Amsterdam)

The engraving below is the earliest image I have found of the Lion incubators. It was the work of Victor Rose and appeared in the Le Monde article of November 10, 1894 about Lion’s exhibit at the Lyon Exposition of 1894. It was reused in several other articles about the Lion Incubator and also on postcards.

The image below shows five of the Lion Incubators in use, circa 1896, in Lion’s storefront for the care of premature babies in Paris, France. Dr. Lion is standing by the end incubator.

Due to its ready availability and excellent track record in Alexandre Lion’s own establishments, the Lion incubators, or incubators of the Lion design manufactured under license, were widely used in exhibitions and sideshows by Martin Couney, and others, beginning with Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court of 1897, followed by commercial exhibits as sideshows in the Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 in Omaha, Nebraska, the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York, and many other expositions in the USA and elsewhere in the Americas in the early 1900s up until the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

Among the known licensees and manufacturers of the Lion incubators are Paul Altmann in Berlin and Kny-Scheerer Co. in the US. Presumably there was also a manufacturer in France, but I have not located that information as yet. The images below are from the June 1, 1900 operating room catalog of Flicoteaux, Borne, and Boulet in Paris, and the 1915 surgical instrument catalog of Kny-Scheerer in New York.

The souvenir booklet from the flagship Lion Institute in Paris ca. 1901 includes the following description of the incubator’s operation:

The last page of Alexandre Lion’s souvenir booklet lists the various hospitals and Maternités where the Lion Incubator was in use in 1901. He truly was an international entrepreneur.

Few of the Lion incubators have survived the passage of time. The image below shows several of the Lion Incubators in use at the Associacao Protectora da Primereira Infancia (APPI) in Lisbon, Portugal, around 1900. Four of the Lion incubators were acquired by APPI’s founder, Rodrigo Antonio Aboim Ascensao, after he attended the Paris Exhibition (Paris Exposition Universelle) in 1900 and saw the incubator pavilion there. The incubators were used for several decades, and were recently restored as shown below.

The images below show the front and back of one of the four surviving Lion incubators at Associacao Protectora da Primereira Infancia (APPI) prior to its restoration around 2011. Images from “The Conservation of Baby Incubators: A Balance between Medical Heritage and Social History”, by Isabel Tissot et al, 2011.

The image below shows one of incubators at APPI after its restoration around 2011. The incubator is currently on display at the Milk Station Museum in Lisbon, Portugal (museudolactario.fasl.org.pt).

A closeup of the nameplate on the surviving incubator in Lisbon was supplied by Drs. Thijs Gras, Amsterdam.

• General Information
  • Dr. Alexandre Lion
  • The Lion Incubator
  • The Engineer and the Newborns, by W. A. Nelson and Paul L. Toubas
• Lion Incubator Patents (France)
  • Patent 201550, 1889
  • Patent 221716, 1892
• Maternité Lion Institutes
  • Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants, Paris
  • Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants, New York
  • Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants, Barcelona
• Maternité Lion Souvenir Booklets
  • Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants , Paris Institute, Booklet Version #1 (appears to be ~1896)
  • Oeuvre Maternelle des Couveuses d’Enfants , Paris Institute, Booklet Version #2 (appears to be ~1901)
  • Pamphlet from Alexander Lion’s exhibit at the 1898 exhibition in Torino, Italy. (PDF supplied by Dr. Thijs Gras, Amsterdam)
• Press Coverage
  • La Maternité “Lion de Nice” pour Enfants Nés Avant Terme ou Débiles, by Dr. Ciaudo, 1895.
  • Les Couveuses pour Enfants, Gazette Médicale de Paris, 1900
  • Couveuses d’Enfants, La Maternité Lion, Paris, La Patrie, 1897
  • Paris Letter: An Improved System of Incubators, by O. Jennings, Pediatrics 1:427-428, 1896
  • Baby Incubators, The Strand Magazine, 1896, by James Walter Smith
  • Human Infant Incubation: A True Fairy-Tale of Modern Science from Leslie’s Weekly, 1897
  • The Saving of Human Life, Maternité Lion in NYC, The Literary Digest, 1898
  • Immature Infants in France, from The Lancet, January 16, 1897, page 196.
  • Alexandre Lion’s Incubator Charities in Europe (1894–1898) (The Embryo Project)
  • Newspaper Articles about Lion’s Storefronts and Expositions
• Worlds Fairs and Expositions
  • Maternité Lion at the Lyon Exposition Universelle et Coloniale, 1894
    • Maternité Lion at the Lyon Exposition Universelle – Le Monde Illustré, 1894
  • Maternité Lion at the Bordeaux Exposition of 1895.
    • “La Maternité Lion,” by Louis Énault, Journal of the Bordeaux Exposition, 1895
  • Maternité Lion at the Amsterdam World Exposition, 1895
  • Maternité Lion at the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung, 1896
  • Maternité Lion at the Exposition National Suisse, Geneva, Switzerland, 1896
  • Maternité Lion at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 1897
  • Maternité Lion at the Brussels International Exposition, 1897
  • Maternité Lion at the Turin L’Esposizione Generale Italiana, 1898
  • Maternite Lion at the Ghent Provincial Exposition of 1899
  • Maternité Lion at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900
  • Woman’s Exhibition in Earls Court, London, 1900
  • Maternité Lion at the Lille Exposition of 1902
  • Maternité Lion at the Marseille Colonial Exposition of 1906
  • Maternite Lion at the Bordeaux International Maritime Exposition of 1907
  • Maternité Lion at the Marseille Exposition Internationale d’Électricité, 1908
  • Maternité Lion at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, Nancy, France, 1909
  • Maternité Lion at the Brussels Exposition Universelle et Internationale, 1910
  • Maternite Lion at the Exposition du Centre de la France, Clermont-Ferrand, 1910
  • Maternité Liion at the Rome International Exposition of 1911
  • Maternité Lion at the Turin International Exposition of 1911
  • Maternité Lion at the Ghent International Exposition of 1913
  • Exposition Internationale Urbaine de Lyon, 1914

Last Updated on 02/05/26