The First Movie Ever Made Was About Babies Growing in a Garden 1896 Story — Transcript

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1. 0:17That footage you just saw is real. A woman in a  corset, standing in a painted garden. She reaches
2. 0:23behind an oversized cabbage. She pulls out a  living baby. She sets it on the ground like
3. 0:27produce. Then she does it again. That film is from  1900. It is the oldest surviving narrative film in
4. 0:34existence. The woman playing the fairy is Yvonne  Mugnier-Serand. The director is Alice Guy-Blache.
5. 0:42And nobody talks about why this particular  story was the first one cinema ever told.
6. 0:47February 1896. Paris. A twenty-two year  old secretary named Alice Guy walks down
7. 0:53Boulevard Poissonniere. She is heading toward  the cabarets of Montmartre. But she stops at a
8. 0:59storefront she has never noticed before. The  windows are lit. Inside, against the wall,
9. 1:04are rows of glass and metal boxes. Inside those  boxes are living human babies. Premature infants,
10. 1:11some small enough to fit in a man's palm. They  are lying in machines modeled after chicken egg
11. 1:16incubators, because that is exactly what they are.  The inventor, a French engineer named Alexandre
12. 1:22Lion, patented this device on October 28, 1889.  He based it on poultry equipment. And he funded
13. 1:29the entire operation by charging the public  admission to come watch newborns fight for their
14. 1:34lives. Fifty thousand visitors paid to see these  babies in the first year alone. Alice Guy was one
15. 1:40of them. Her granddaughter, Regine Blache-Bolton,  confirmed this decades later. Alice walked into
16. 1:46that storefront, saw infants displayed in glass  boxes for paying strangers, and three months later
17. 1:51created the first narrative film ever recorded.  A fairy harvesting babies from a cabbage garden.
18. 1:57The art nouveau poster advertising Lion's  exhibition makes the connection even more
19. 2:02explicit. Designed by Adolfo Hohenstein, it shows  a nurse cradling three infants. Behind her, vines
20. 2:09sprout baby heads in place of flowers. Drawings of  children growing like botanical specimens fill the
21. 2:15background. This poster hung on the streets  of Paris in 1896. Babies depicted as things
22. 2:20that grow on plants. Not born. Grown. That visual  language appeared on a Paris boulevard before the
23. 2:26postcards, before the dolls, before any of it. Now here is where most people who have covered
24. 2:31this topic start. The postcards. Between 1900  and 1920, hundreds of thousands of postcards
25. 2:38flooded Europe and North America showing  babies growing in cabbage patches. Babies
26. 2:43being pulled from the earth like vegetables.  Babies tended by gardeners and delivered to
27. 2:48couples who browse through them like shoppers  selecting fruit. These were not produced by a
28. 2:52single company running a campaign. They came from  dozens of studios across Germany, France, Russia,
29. 2:58Spain, Britain, and the United States. Multiple  languages, multiple artistic styles, no documented
30. 3:04coordinating source. Art historians classify them  as whimsical birth announcements. Sentimental
31. 3:10imagery. Harmless folklore. And they are partially  right. In France, children had been told for
32. 3:16centuries that boys come from cabbage patches and  girls from rose bushes. French parents still call
33. 3:21their babies "mon petit chou," my little cabbage.  In Scotland, children placed cabbage leaves
34. 3:27outside to ask fairies for siblings. In Ireland,  you were told you were found under a stalk of
35. 3:32cabbage. The folklore is old and widespread. So let me address this directly. Maybe the
36. 3:37postcards are exactly what art historians say  they are. Birth announcements based on folk
37. 3:42tradition. Charming. Innocent. Unconnected to  anything darker. If this were the whole picture,
38. 3:47I would accept that explanation and move on.  But the timeline refuses to stay innocent.
39. 3:53Because during the exact decades these  postcards circulated, between 1900 and 1920,
40. 3:59the largest mass displacement of children  in American history was underway. And
41. 4:04the scale of it is difficult to process. September 20, 1854. A train pulls out of New
42. 4:11York City carrying forty-six children. They range  from infants to twelve years old. No parents are
43. 4:16with them. No family waits at the destination.  When they arrive in Dowagiac, Michigan,
44. 4:21they are lined up on a railroad platform.  Local families walk past, inspect them, and
45. 4:26choose which ones to take home. This is the first  orphan train. The last train departs on May 31,
46. 4:321929, carrying three children to Sulfur Springs,  Texas. By then, between two hundred thousand and
47. 4:39two hundred fifty thousand children will have  been transported this way. At peak volume,
48. 4:44three to four thousand children per year were  shipped west. The first agent, E.P. Smith, let
49. 4:50passengers adopt boys without checking references.  He played on audience sympathy, pointing out that
50. 4:56boys were "handy" and girls "could be used for  all types of housework." Many of these children
51. 5:00were used strictly as farm labor. Many were not  orphans at all. They were children of immigrants
52. 5:05and poor families. The co-founders of the program  later acknowledged this. The children traveled for
53. 5:11days in uncomfortable conditions, sometimes  on trains barely better than cattle cars.
54. 5:16Two or three adult chaperones supervised thirty  to forty children at a time. When they arrived,
55. 5:22they had no birth certificates, no  verified family histories, no provable
56. 5:26identity. An estimated two million descendants are  alive today, many of whom still cannot trace their
57. 5:33lineage past the train platform. Where did they  come from? The cabbage patch. That was the answer
58. 5:39the culture gave. Not literally, but functionally.  The mythology did the same work as a shrug.
59. 5:46And the orphan trains were only the  American chapter. Across the Atlantic,
60. 5:50the system was older and larger. The foundling  wheel, called the ruota in Italy, was a rotating
61. 5:56wooden cylinder built into the wall of a hospital  or church. A woman could place her infant inside,
62. 6:01ring a bell, and the staff on the other side  would rotate the wheel to receive the child.
63. 6:06Anonymous. No questions. No records of the parent.  The first one was installed in Rome in 1198. By
64. 6:13the 1400s they had spread across Catholic Europe.  By the 1800s, the numbers are staggering. Over
65. 6:19one hundred thousand foundlings abandoned annually  across the continent. In France, Italy, and Spain,
66. 6:25as many as one in three babies born in cities  was deposited into these institutions. France
67. 6:30alone had two hundred and fifty-one foundling  wheels at their peak, legalized on January 19,
68. 6:351811. The death rate inside these foundling  hospitals averaged eighty percent. In some
69. 6:41years it approached one hundred percent. Children  who survived were renamed. In Italy, they were
70. 6:46called Esposito, meaning exposed. In Milan, they  were named Colombo, after the pigeons outside
71. 6:53the foundling home. In France, they were called  Trouve. Found. Parents sometimes left a token, a
72. 7:00ribbon, a coin, a piece of torn fabric, hoping to  reclaim the child someday. Most never returned.
73. 7:07So now hold the timeline in your mind. 1198,  the first foundling wheel is installed in
74. 7:13Rome. By the 1700s, "boys from cabbages, girls  from roses" is the standard explanation given
75. 7:19to children across France. 1811, France legalizes  two hundred and fifty-one foundling wheels. 1854,
76. 7:27the first orphan train leaves New York. 1863,  France begins closing its foundling wheels.
77. 7:331869, Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon places a cradle  on a Manhattan stoop to receive abandoned babies,
78. 7:40founding the New York Foundling Hospital. 1889,  Alexandre Lion patents his baby incubator,
79. 7:47modeled on chicken egg equipment. February 1896,  Alice Guy visits Lion's incubator exhibition on
80. 7:54Boulevard Poissonniere and sees babies in  glass boxes displayed for paying strangers.
81. 8:00Spring 1896, she films La Fee aux Choux. The first  narrative film in history is about harvesting
82. 8:06babies from a garden. That same year, incubator  babies are exhibited at the Berlin Exposition
83. 8:13under the name Kinderbrutanstalt. That word  translates to child hatchery. 1900 to 1920,
84. 8:21cabbage baby postcards flood the Western  world. 1903, Martin Couney opens his permanent
85. 8:28incubator exhibit at Coney Island, displaying  premature infants next to sword swallowers and
86. 8:33sideshow acts. He charges twenty-five cents  admission. He runs it for forty years.
87. 8:39Each piece connects to the next. Each decade  adds another layer. And every layer uses the
88. 8:44same language. Children as things that are grown,  harvested, displayed, selected, and distributed.
89. 8:50Not born to families. Delivered to them.  By fairies. By gardeners. By institutions.
90. 8:56I need to be honest about something. I sat with  this research for almost a week before I started
91. 9:03writing. Not because the facts were hard to find.  They are well documented. The orphan trains have
92. 9:08a PBS documentary. The foundling wheels are in  medical journals. Alice Guy-Blache's visit to
93. 9:14the incubator exhibition is confirmed by her own  granddaughter. The problem was not evidence. The
94. 9:19problem was that every time I laid the timeline  out, I could hear how it would sound. I could hear
95. 9:24reasonable people saying I was forcing a pattern  onto unrelated events. And I kept asking myself
96. 9:30whether that was true. Whether folklore is just  folklore. Whether postcards are just postcards.
97. 9:36Whether the fact that all of this clusters in  the same decades across the same countries is
98. 9:40simply what coincidence looks like at scale. But then I found what Salvador Dali said about
99. 9:45the postcards. Dali collected them. So did Andre  Breton. So did Paul Eluard, who called them "a
100. 9:52Lilliputian hallucination of the world."  Dali called them "the most lively document
101. 9:57of popular modern thought, a thought so profound  or so sharp that it eludes psychoanalysis." The
102. 10:03surrealists did not collect them as whimsy. They  collected them because they recognized something
103. 10:08in the imagery that resisted easy explanation.  A British art dealer named James Birch began
104. 10:13collecting them in Aix-en-Provence. He later found  a display case of them at the Pompidou Centre,
105. 10:19exhibited for their "inspirational importance"  to the Dadaists and Surrealists. He published
106. 10:24a book called "Babylon: Surreal Babies"  in 2010. Even the art world knew these
107. 10:30postcards carried something heavier than charm. And the postcards were not gentle. Some of them
108. 10:34show babies being sold. Some reference lotteries  of children. Some depict gardeners tending
109. 10:40rows of infants while couples browse and point.  The imagery is commercial. Transactional. It
110. 10:46mirrors the mechanics of the foundling system  and the orphan trains with disturbing precision.
111. 10:51Babies appear from the earth. They have no  parents, no origin story, no history. Someone
112. 10:57selects them. Someone takes them home. This  is not what a birth announcement looks like.
113. 11:02This is what displacement looks like when a  culture has agreed to call it something else.
114. 11:07The medical establishment during this era makes  the picture darker. Martin Couney, the man who ran
115. 11:13baby incubator exhibits at Coney Island for four  decades, likely never held a legitimate medical
116. 11:18license. He fabricated his credentials because the  real medical profession refused to help premature
117. 11:23babies at all. A Chicago doctor produced a film  advocating for letting them die, tagged "Kill
118. 11:29Defectives, Save the Nation." The Boston Medical  and Surgical Journal questioned in 1901 whether
119. 11:35saving premature infants was even "worthwhile."  The eugenics movement called them weaklings who
120. 11:40would pollute the gene pool. In this environment,  the only way to save a premature baby was to
121. 11:44display it in a glass box at an amusement park.  Couney saved over six thousand five hundred lives
122. 11:49this way. His nurse, Madame Recht, would slide  a diamond ring up a baby's arm to the shoulder
123. 11:55to show audiences how small the infants were.  When Couney died, his death certificate did not
124. 12:01mention medicine. Neither did Alexandre Lion's.  Lion, the man whose invention inspired the first
125. 12:07movie ever made, was described on his death  certificate in 1934 as a wandering salesman.
126. 12:13Eighty years after the postcards faded from  circulation, the story came back. In 1976,
127. 12:19a twenty-one year old Georgia art student named  Xavier Roberts discovered dolls at a craft fair
128. 12:25made by a Kentucky folk artist named Martha  Nelson Thomas. Thomas had been making what she
129. 12:30called Doll Babies since the early 1970s. Each  one came with a birth certificate and adoption
130. 12:35papers. Roberts purchased her dolls, then began  making his own when Thomas cut him off. He renamed
131. 12:41them Little People. A licensing agent named Roger  Schlaifer renamed them Cabbage Patch Kids in 1982
132. 12:48and created the origin mythology. The official  story said Xavier Roberts was a ten year old boy
133. 12:54who followed a BunnyBee behind a waterfall into  a magical cabbage patch where babies were being
134. 12:59born. Roberts sold the dolls from BabyLand General  Hospital, a converted abandoned medical clinic in
135. 13:04Georgia. He did not sell them. You adopted them.  Each doll came with a unique birth certificate
136. 13:10and adoption papers. No parents listed. Born  in a cabbage patch. Martha Nelson Thomas,
137. 13:15the woman who actually created the concept,  sued Roberts. They settled out of court
138. 13:20in 1985 for an undisclosed amount. Her name  disappeared from the product. Sound familiar?
139. 13:26Coleco mass-produced them in 1983. Three  million sold by the end of that year.
140. 13:33Twenty million in 1984. Two billion dollars  in retail sales. Americans physically fought
141. 13:39each other in stores to adopt these dolls.  Dolls with no parents, born from cabbages,
142. 13:45distributed through a converted hospital.  The entire apparatus of the foundling system,
143. 13:50compressed into a toy. And nobody noticed what  the story was actually about because the story
144. 13:55had been telling itself for eight hundred years. Every culture needs a narrative to explain what it
145. 14:00cannot say plainly. You do not tell a child their  sibling was deposited in a wooden box in a church
146. 14:06wall by a mother who could not afford to feed  them. You tell the child their sibling was found
147. 14:10in the cabbage patch. You do not tell a community  that two hundred and fifty thousand children were
148. 14:16stripped of their identities and shipped  across a continent. You send postcards of
149. 14:20babies growing in gardens, tended by fairies,  delivered to loving homes. The fairy tale
150. 14:25does the work of erasure. It always has. Alice Guy-Blache saw babies in glass boxes
151. 14:31on a Paris boulevard and turned the experience  into the first story cinema ever told. That
152. 14:36story was about a fairy pulling children from  a garden. The original 1896 film is now lost.
153. 14:43Ninety percent of all films made before 1929  are gone. We preserved almost nothing from
154. 14:48the birth of cinema. The one film that might  tell us what the culture was processing when
155. 14:52it chose this story as its first has vanished. The postcards are in museum archives. The orphan
156. 14:58train records are in genealogical databases.  The foundling wheel mechanisms still sit in the
157. 15:04walls of old hospitals across Europe. The Cabbage  Patch Kids are in attics and storage units across
158. 15:10America, each one with its adoption certificate  still tucked inside. And somewhere between
159. 15:15folklore and documentation, between fairy tale and  institutional record, there is a question no one
160. 15:21has properly asked. What story does a civilization  tell itself when it needs to explain where all
161. 15:27the children came from? What mythology does it  build when the truth is too large, too systemic,
162. 15:33too uncomfortable for a direct answer? And when  that mythology appears in the first film, the most
163. 15:38popular postcards, and the best-selling toy of  the twentieth century, all using the same image?
164. 15:44Babies without parents, harvested from a garden.  What exactly are we looking at? A coincidence that
165. 15:50spans eight centuries and six continents? Or the  longest-running cover story in Western history?