the.com/incubator
A warm box that keeps fragile things alive long enough to become businesses or babies.
means A device or organization that nurtures something delicate—premature infants, microbes, or startups—through its vulnerable early stage.
from From Latin incubare, to lie upon, like a hen brooding eggs; the warming machine came first in the 1850s, the startup metaphor in the 1950s.
Hatchery rootsOriginally engineered for poultry eggs, then premature human babies.
Coney IslandPremature infants were once displayed in boardwalk incubator sideshows.
Startup senseBatavia, New York coined the business meaning in 1959.