There are no pipes or other sources of heat in the egg chambers. All
temperature regulation is by means of air heated (or cooled as the
case may be) outside of the egg rooms and forced into the egg rooms
by a motor driven cone fan, maintaining a steady current of air, the
rate of movement of which may be varied at will. The air movement
maintained will always be sufficiently brisk, however, to prevent an
unevenness of temperature in different parts of the room.
So simple is this that the reader will doubtless wonder why it was
not developed earlier. The reason is that air subject to the
climatic influences will, with any forced draft sufficient to
equalize temperature, result in a fatal rate of evaporation.
Sprinkling the air has not generally been thought practical because
of the notion that air must not be used in the egg chamber but once,
which involved quite a waste of heat necessary in warming a large
bulk of air and evaporating sufficient water. Moreover, no means
has, in the past, been available for making a sufficiently accurate
measurement of the evaporating power of the air.
The hair hygrometers commonly sold to incubator operators are known
by scientists to be absolutely unreliable. The range between the wet
and dry bulb thermometers was found in the Ontario experiments to
give readings with and without fanning that varied 15 to 20 per
cent. in relative humidity which, at the temperature of an egg
chamber, would amount to a variation of three to four hundred of
vapor pressure units, which, with the forced draught plan, would
ruin a hatch of eggs in a few hours. The sling psychrometer as used
by the U.S. Weather Bureau should, in the hands of an expert, give
results making possible measurements accurate to two or three per
cent. of relative humidity or forty to sixty units of vapor
pressure. In contrast with these blundering instruments we now have
available an instrument with which the writer has frequently
determined vapor pressure accurately to within a range of two or
three vapor pressure units and the instrument is capable of being
constructed for even finer work.
As it is only by means of air with the moisture content absolutely
controlled that the use of a large room becomes possible, we can now
see why this type of hatching remained so long undeveloped. By means
of such vapor pressure control the large egg chamber is not only
feasible but the rate of evaporation at once becomes subject to the
control of the operator and we achieve a perfection in artificial
incubation hitherto unattained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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