I was reading about Edmond Albius, the former slave who learned how to pollinate the vanilla plant (at age 12!), which is why we have commercial vanilla today.
Albius’s manual pollination method is still used today, as nearly all vanilla is pollinated by hand.
That’s why “Madagascar vanilla” is such a funny marketing term. It’s trying to make it sound exotic, but it’s the biggest source of vanilla. Vanilla pretty much has to come from a super impoverished country to be able to be cultivated with hand pollination. They grow vanilla on hawaii, and a single bean costs $20. It might taste better than $1 madagascan beans, but probably not 20 times better.