A long time ago when Jessie came to visit Grandpa Paul’s farm she said, “Where are the chooks?” She had a clear idea about what should be on a farm and I guess she was checking in the barn, and found none. She did find a cat, a dog, and an African Grey parrot, but farms aren’t complete without a barn with some farm animals in it. Farm animals are different than pets, at least on productive farms. As my father-in law said, “Around here it is produce or else”.

Jessie’s grandma had grown up on a farm where the income realized from 10,000 chooks proved to be insufficient, even though they raised their own chicks hatched in their own incubators. The chicks were moved to brooding houses heated with pot belly stoves, and were kept near the heat source with a cardboard wall ring that circled the stove. Nothing was regulated by an electric thermostat and the chicks were monitored closely. Ellen’s grandfather used to take the eggs into Boston using his horse and wagon. Much has changed since then, though Ellen still loves the fluffy little chicks, and now the grandkids do too.

I’ve related that our first chickens in Africa were gifts from the Zandes. My rooster’s offspring severely humiliated his father, once a proud undefeated cock, and the small flock was just living in their pen laying very few eggs. The ground corn I gave them didn’t supply the nutrients they needed. They weren’t very productive. We sometimes let the hens set on eggs to try to maintain the flock, but with very little success as there was no place for them to hide from the hawks. The eggs were also very small.

Roscoe Lee’s flock of Rode Island Red hens were laying well, fed with chicken mash he imported from Kampala. Their eggs were twice as large and also fertile since he had two roosters. He offered me some eggs if I wanted to try incubating them.

Of course I was interested. All I had to do was produce an environment, with the correct temperature and humidity, that could be maintained for three weeks. The eggs also needed to be turned several times a day to keep the embryo from adhering to the shell and drying out. The idea was to mimic the way God had created the hens to hatch their own eggs. There are those who otherwise appear to be intelligent and think that God wasn’t involved in this design.

I was the science teacher at Rethy and I loved to design things with whatever was available. The diesel generators ran only four hours during the day and three in the evening so I couldn’t use electricity as the source of heat. We used kerosene as the source of heat to make the gas in our refrigerators expand, circulate, cool, condense and eventually vaporize to freeze things. Why not use a kerosene burner as the source of controlled heat for an incubator?

The hen, during brooding, maintains a steady body temperature, although it is a little higher when she first starts to set. Since she lays at most one egg a day, and maybe hatches out a dozen chicks, she accumulates the eggs over a couple weeks, yet they all hatch at the same time, 21 days after she starts. When she comes in to her nest each day she moves all the existing eggs around as she steps on them and settles down to lay the next egg. She just keeps laying, until it feels right, I guess. When she starts setting in earnest, her body temperature is a little elevated, about 102 degrees for the first day or so, stimulating all the embryos to become activated at once.

I could do that. I would keep the eggs at room temperature, and move them around a little every day until the incubator was heated, and would hold steady, at about 102 degrees. I would then add the thirty eggs so they could be brought up to temperature. I would need an accurate thermometer in order to monitor the temperature and then keep it at 99.5 degrees for 21 more days.

The hen also gets off her nest every day, runs around, eats, drinks, and makes her messes before she goes back. She might be wet with dew or dry after her dust bath, yet when she comes back to the eggs and settles down the relative humidity will soon match hers and be 40 to 50%. She will adjust herself and use her beak to draw any stray eggs back under her.

That could be a little tricky since to move all the eggs, in my incubator, by hand, would necessitate opening the box and upsetting the controlled environment. I could keep a tray of water in there to evaporate slowly so it wouldn’t become too dry. With dry bulb and wet bulb thermometers from the school science room I could compare the readings and look up the relative humidity. Changing the amount of water, or increasing the evaporation surface, should make it possible to control the humidity.

During the construction of my incubator I discovered a little hen that I thought had been lost. She was busy clucking and pecking, offering crumbs to the tiny fluffy chicks that appeared from beneath her and then disappeared again. She had hatched 12 healthy chicks. I found no abandoned eggs in her nearby nest in the bushes. She had a 100% hatch of healthy chicks

I built my incubator. I used heated water, circulating by convection currents through copper piping, to transfer the heat into the controlled environment for the eggs. I had made a few oxygen holes to let some fresh air enter the box. I could view the chamber through a window I had built into the side of the it. The wet and dry bulbs of the lab thermometers were set to record the temperature near the top of the eggs. The difference in the readings, when checked against the chart, gave me the relative humidity. The dowel rods, on which the eggs would rest, projected out one end of the box so I could rotate two adjacent rods, at the same time, in the same direction, and turn the eggs.

The most difficult thing to control was the temperature. Of course the little hen, that hatched 100% of her eggs in her nest on the ground, had a healthy body temperature established by her Creator. She had feathers, another well designed feature that kept in the heat and basically eliminated heat loss during the cool nights. The feathers also shed water if it rained. I tried to copy the Designer’s heat settings and maintain a stable 99.5 degrees for my eggs.

The Aladdin lamp burner provided the heat which flowed up a metal tube acting like the lamp’s chimney. The tube became hot and the heat was transferred by conduction to the water filled copper pipe wrapped around it. At the other end of the incubator water entered the pipe from the bottom of a pint reservoir, passed under the enclosure, was heated, and entered just above the eggs. The “S” shaped curves in the piping provided the length needed to radiate the heat, from above, down onto the eggs, just like the hen. The heated water exited the box flowing out into the top of the reservoir. The water circulated by convection currents.

The hen gave no thought about the perfect heat regulation system she had been given. She just used it. I gave quite a bit of thought to regulating the heat level. My box was made of mahogany and had no insulation. I depended on the heat regulation system. My heat source burned kerosene.

The Aladdin lamp burner, when turned low, burned with a steady blue flame. I would need to monitor it carefully to clean and adjust the circular wick as needed. Those lamps, cleaned daily, were normally used for several hours each night. I planned to use mine continuously for over 550 hours. The flame would no doubt change as the charred residue accumulated on the wick and the kerosene level in the reservoir decreased. I needed some sort of thermostat.

When Ellen’s dad moved to the farm in New York he brought with him the equipment he had used on his chicken farm, including a metallic thermostat bellows. The gas trapped between the thin flexible disks expanded as it warmed and contracted when it cooled. The thickness of the bellows increased by as much as half an inch as it heated. I had brought one to Africa with me. It would be the heart of my system.

If the incubator became too hot, the flow of water could be reduced by a needle valve dropping into the opening of the copper pipe. At the same time, the damper could be lifted from the top of the heat tube, allowing hot air to escape rather than heating the tube and the water in the surrounding pipe.

The movement of the bellows was amplified, using a third class lever, and transferred with a chord over a pulley to move the needle valve. An additional lever reversed the movement and lifted the damper. After monitoring the temperature for several days the eggs were introduced. I carefully placed them on the closely spaced dowels that would be used to rotate them.

While faithfully monitoring my incubator, rotating the eggs several times a day, I watched the little hen care for her chicks. She still had twelve, but they began to scatter.

She eventually lost one, that was snatched by a black kite, when it failed to hide instantly at her warning. The hen flew into the air squawking and scratching but was unable to get the black kite to drop her chick. The terrified, desperate, peeping soon faded away.

Eventually I found out that the little hen from Banda was far better designed for hatching eggs than my proudly crafted incubator. I just assumed that my intelligent design, carefully executed by one who had studied physics as his minor at Wheaton College, would work. I had read up on hatching eggs and all the conditions had been met.

The eggs began hatching a little later than I had anticipated. I hadn’t been content with my tiny chickens and was looking for maybe 20 or 25 Rode Island Red birds like those my fellow missionary had imported from Kampala. I think I was trying to impress my science students as I explained how everything worked. Maybe they learned something.

There were also the dorm workers, like Manasse, who came in each day to pick up the dirty laundry. They knew all about my little project. I was asked how the chicks would get out of their eggs with no mother hen to help them. I, as the one who knew everything, explained that the hens don’t open the eggs, the chick had an especially hard point on the top of their beak, called the egg tooth, that broke the shell from inside. After the chick hatches, the egg tooth falls off. I had explained earlier that the under sized pullet eggs weren’t laid by a rooster to show the hens how to do it; they were just a hen’s first eggs. The dorm workers were very skeptical of the whole project.

There was no contest. The hen with her 100% results won by far. The Creator of the Universe had designed her. I thought my incubator was an intelligent design, but only six chicks actually hatched out, though a few more managed to crack their shells. They didn’t have the strength to squirm around inside and keep pushing out with their egg tooth until they could break out. Several chicks had a problem with their legs kicking out sideways and couldn’t walk properly. I find it is called splayed legs and is often caused by temperature or humidity problems during incubation. My chicks hatched out late, probably a temperature problem. Three days later I had only three viable chicks. I don’t recall that I raised any of my chicks to maturity. The hen still had ten when I gave up.

Score for my intelligent design, 10%. Some not too intelligent people vote for the hen having evolved her egg hatching skills. God calls them fools. I know God created the first chickens, male and female, and designed them so they could multiply, hatching their own eggs.

Some of my African workers at the dorm were amazed and marveled that I could hatch eggs in a box with no hen. Sarah, Lawi’s wife, who sold popped goi to the dorm called me “Solomono.”

I confess, it was rather nice to be called wise in that way, but I know that it is really the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom. When we aren’t too proud to admit that we lack wisdom He says that we can ask Him. He is the one who freely grants wisdom and doesn’t mind when we ask, but once we ask Him we must never even think of developing our own design for our lives.

Maybe if I was sick, and was in bed for three weeks, and kept a fertile egg in my arm pit, I could hatch it.